


you're a hard act to follow

by shantealeaves



Category: Persona 5
Genre: 3rd Semester, Accidental Voyeurism, Bondage, Exhibitionism, Knifeplay, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Oral Sex, Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers, Semi-Public Sex, Strip Tease, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:22:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26998156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shantealeaves/pseuds/shantealeaves
Summary: Each night when it starts to get dark, Goro thinks about responding to any of the mindless texts Akira has sent him throughout the day. Each night he remembers that Akira has spent the entire day with one of his friends, that he may well be planning on reneging on their deal because of how much he likes this new reality where his friends are perfect and Goro is alive but shuffled off somewhere in the background, saved and out of his life.Each night Goro eventually gets tired of thinking about all that. He puts his phone down and finds somewhere he’s not supposed to be instead.(Coping with the events of third semester, Goro Akechi finds that he likes watching things he's not supposed to see. One of those things is Akira Kurusu.)
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist, Maruki Takuto/Shibusawa (background), Persona 5 Protagonist/Other(s)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 223





	1. Chapter 1

_“We’ll meet again on January 9,” Maruki said. “I pray you’ll change your mind by then.”_

When they tumble out of the Metaverse and onto the ground in front of the Odaiba construction site, Goro and Akira are both still trying to catch their breath. Goro feels his pulse still racing from their improvised attack, something that came out of nothing but desperation and necessity and trust, and somehow, it had worked.

If the feeling of racing through a palace and tearing through shadows had made Goro feel like things were finally going _right_ for the first time in this nightmarish world, then that attack was that feeling of rightness a hundred times over. There was Akira, nodding at him when they both knew what needed to be done; Akira, moving in perfect sync with him to cover Goro’s blind spots as Goro covered his; Akira, giving Goro a single look that somehow turned the world into something dark and mysterious that belonged entirely to them, a place where together, they could do anything.

Now they’re back in the real world, and the bracingly cold January air hits Goro’s face like a slap, chastising him: _Don’t forget what you’re here for._

“I have to save Sumire,” Akira says, finally breaking the silence that’s gone on just a little bit too long. Those words are like a second slap—Akira isn’t even looking at Goro anymore, his eyes resolute.

Goro’s worried about her too. Of course he is—she’s been kidnapped into the perverse world of a megalomaniac counselor, of course he’s worried—but the way he says it, like Goro isn’t even there, is just another confirmation of how idiotic he’s been to let himself get swept away in some childish little fantasy over the last few hours.

“Don’t be stupid,” he snarls more harshly than he intends. Akira snaps his head towards Goro like he’d forgotten he was there, and that only rankles Goro even more. “It’d be suicide to go back in now. We need intel first; we have to know more than nothing. I’ll do some investigating on my own.”

When Akira furrows his brow in response and looks at him with his big doe eyes, Goro growls again, turning away. “I hate that we have to simply follow his orders, but you’ll have to go off with your little friends and do as he says. We’ll meet up here next week.”

“Okay,” Akira says quietly. He’s still just looking at Goro. When he continues to not say anything more the stare starts to get a little unnerving. Where they’d just been working together smoothly in the palace, seeming to read each other’s minds and movements like they were extensions of one another, now they are all uncomfortable, awkward silences.

They speak at the same time, Goro starting, “I imagine—” as Akira says, “Do you want to—”

They both pause, but where Akira’s voice was quiet and uncertain Goro’s was harsh and cold, so Akira naturally cuts himself off and gives Goro a nod to go on. Goro does. “—that both of our lives will be very different if you choose to live in this reality with your friends. Hopefully you won’t be as weak-willed and pathetic as them.”

Goro gives Akira half a second to continue whatever it was he was going to say—but when Akira just exhales sharply and nods, looking down at the ground, Goro scoffs and turns around, taking off.

He waits around the corner until he sees Akira go off towards the train station. Only then does he let out a breath and a groan.

His head is throbbing a bit—from all that they’ve done today, from finally more or less piecing together what’s going on, and from Akira. It’s a relief that Akira’s finally gone so Goro can clear his head and focus on the mission ahead.

That’s all this is: a mission. They each have their tasks playing to their strengths: Akira will win over those dear brainwashed friends of his, and Goro will work from the shadows, utterly alone. He’s always done his best work alone; this is no exception.

When he thinks about how less than an hour ago he was fighting side-by-side with the one person he’s ever tolerated working with and feeling more alive than he’d ever felt when he was _actually_ alive, it hurts a bit, maybe.

So he doesn’t think about it. He surveys the perimeter of the construction lot. It’s nearing dusk, and the deep shadows of walls and vending machines give him plenty of places to hide.

Goro’s done his fair share of tailing people as a detective and a hitman both. He’s put in his time in the cold with a pair of high-powered binoculars and a receiver. Some might call him skilled at spying; he simply considers himself a master of perseverance.

So it’s nothing to crouch in the shadow of a vending machine and think about absolutely nothing but the task ahead of him. Something to focus on. Something he can do.

A little less than an hour later, Maruki appears in front of the construction site just a few dozen meters away from where Goro is crouching. He no longer has his slicked-back hair and authoritative gaze; now, he’s nothing but a frazzled nobody who Goro would never give a second glance.

Goro notes with no small amount of dread that Maruki hasn’t returned to the real world with Yoshizawa in tow. He hopes for Maruki’s own sake that she’s safe wherever he’s keeping her—because she belongs to that class of friends who Akira would kill for, without a question.

(Goro knows he isn’t in that group. He’s in some unique class all his own—certainly not a friend anymore, not even someone Akira seems to particularly _like_ anymore, and absolutely not someone he’d kill for. But someone for whom Akira would, despite all that, apparently twist reality to bring back to life.

He’s only had that part of it worked out for less than ten hours; much like the rest of this situation, he doesn’t know quite how to feel about it. So he pushes that thought out of his head, too, and turns his attention back to his task.)

Maruki takes a moment to compose himself—he doesn’t seem quite used to the full rush of entering and exiting the Metaverse—then starts off toward the train station.

Goro considers the situation. He doesn’t know exactly where Maruki is going, not yet, so he can’t gauge how busy it will be at their destination station; and it’s a bit past rush hour already, so the subway cars will be full but not packed—not quite crowded enough for Goro to pull off anything once they’re inside.

His best bet is going to be when Maruki gets on the train; he’ll just have to hope that enough people will be passing by that he won’t notice a little movement at his side.

Luck, for once, is on his side. The train arrives and a wave of people stand at the door waiting to exit. Maruki stands to the side to let all the passengers off, and Goro slips through that crowd of passengers up right next to Maruki, slips a small button-like object into Maruki’s coat pocket, and then gets swept away with the crowd. Once Maruki has stepped into the subway car, he quickly walks to the next car down and steps in just before the doors shut.

He thinks he might have felt Maruki jolt just a bit at the feeling of something hitting his side. Even if he did, he didn’t seem to consciously notice it, just kept staring ahead. A laughably easy target, mind probably stuck in his shadow world instead of the real one around him.

They get off at a stop Goro’s never been to and step out into a thoroughly uninteresting neighborhood. Hardly luxurious—but not objectionable, either. The very definition of Tokyo mediocrity.

Once Maruki steps into the apartment building Goro waits half a minute, then walks up to the door. Perfect—the doorbells are easily accessible; it’s not the sort of building that would have a doorman or, god forbid, any reasonable level of security. And labelled in clear letters next to apartment 4D’s bell is a sticker with the name “Maruki.”

It takes only a perfunctory search to find a realtor’s floor plans to figure out which side of the street 4D is on. From there it’s simply a matter of making his way to the roof of a building across the street with the help of a few trash cans and a fire escape.

This part isn’t, strictly speaking, something Goro’s been trained to do. Certainly, as a junior detective who barely convinced the department to give him any meaningful investigative powers in the first place, he was never _officially_ trained on anything like spying or breaking and entering. But all it takes, he’s learned, is two things: one, a hyper-vigilant awareness of what’s going on around him, which Goro has possessed out of necessity since his time in foster care, and two, a distinct lack of giving any shits at all.

That one is particularly important because he doesn’t even know if this investigation will yield anything useful. Maybe Maruki’s window shades will be closed and he’ll have to rely on the planted microphone only. Maybe, even if the window is open, all Maruki will do this evening is brush his teeth and go to sleep. As much work as they are, it’s rare in Goro’s experience for a stakeout to turn up useful results the first night.

But Goro can keep watching as long as he needs to. It’s not as if he has literally anything else to do in this world.

Once Goro has settled into a somewhat comfortable spot on the roof of a building, he sees that he’s lucky once again today. The shades are wide open; a lamp is casting a warm, yellow light on the entire studio apartment, and Maruki is right there in plain view of the window.

He seems to simply be...sitting there. Maybe meditating? He’s a fucking therapist, is that what they do for fun? It’s horribly uninteresting to watch, and when it goes on for another five minutes or so Goro finds himself turning the volume up on his receiver’s earpiece and trying to see if Maruki’s listening to something.

That turns out to be a terrible decision when an explosive _BZZZT_ rings through the apartment. It’s so loud Goro has to yank the earpiece out.

By the time he’s recovered, Maruki’s already at the door.

Company. Goro refocuses his binoculars, the tiniest bit of anticipation finally building. After all, he’s never seen a palace ruled by the real person and not a shadow proxy; if Maruki is in charge of the plan from the side of the cognitive world, it’s not impossible to believe that he has some confidant executing things in the real world. That’s the hope, anyway.

Maruki opens the door to a man holding a bottle of wine. About the same age as Maruki, with dark hair and stubble, a salaryman who’s a hell of a lot more put together than Maruki. As they greet each other and make small talk while coats and shoes are removed, Goro grabs his notepad and jots down the name he hears— _Shibusawa._

“As cheap as ever, I see,” Maruki says fondly after they’ve poured glasses and settled on the couch.

“What can I say,” Shibusawa responds with a small smile. “Student habits die hard.”

“Unlike me, though, you can afford to kill them,” Maruki says, but he laughs and takes another swig.

They sit and drink in silence for a bit until Shibusawa says, “You look exhausted. Hard day at work?”

Maruki grimaces. “Something like that.”

“I figured. You only ever call me over like this when you need a distraction.”

“That’s not true,” Maruki says with a frown.

“It’s truly okay, Takuto,” Shibusawa says, and he sounds like he means it. “I’m here for whatever you need, no matter what.”

That lights a fire in Maruki’s eyes, the same fire Goro saw earlier that day when Maruki was defending his righteous decision to kidnap Yoshizawa. “No,” he says, quietly but with intensity. “I’m fighting for a world where everyone gets what makes them happy. You know that.” He leans over towards Shibusawa, expression fiercely serious. “So tell me, Kousuke, what makes _you_ happy. And take it.”

Before he’s even finished speaking, Shibusawa pushes him down onto the couch and settles his lips onto Maruki’s. Mid-kiss, Maruki stops and puts his wine glass safely on the floor, and then there’s not much for Goro to hear from his microphone besides the rustling of clothes, of skin on skin.

Shibusawa hastily unbuttons Maruki’s shirt, eager to touch every inch. He looks so fond, so _enraptured—_ it makes Goro want to gag, but also makes him want to cackle a bit, too.

Because Maruki is very silent and near-expressionless. He’s responding physically to what’s happening, no doubt about that—there’s a flush on his cheeks, and he gasps when Shibusawa kisses down his neck—but he looks distant, like his mind is far away.

And Shibusawa is utterly oblivious, entirely content. He reaches down to start groping at Maruki’s ass, clearly having his own idea of how this all should go, but when a queasy look crosses Maruki’s face Shibusawa doesn’t hesitate to flip their positions and pull Maruki on top of him. That, at least, shocks Maruki’s attention back to him. “I want you to take me however you want, Takuto,” he growls. “ _That’s_ what I want.”

Maruki looks down at him with a mixture of fondness and pity, and if Goro was ever on the receiving end of that sort of look in bed, he’d have no qualms about shooting his partner in the face. But as Maruki simply gives a solemn nod, Shibusawa preens, and starts working his own clothes off.

At least Maruki’s hard by now. They move fairly quickly after that, relocating to the futon in the other corner of the tiny studio apartment, and finally Maruki is rocking into him, Shibusawa gasping and Maruki nearly silent.

And Goro watches.

Goro can’t quite figure out why he watches.

It has to be one of the least arousing things he’s seen: neither of these men is particularly Goro’s type, least of all the maniac who wants to deprive the world of free will. Goro might be into certain kinds of crazy, but not that kind.

So it’s not hot, per se. He’s watching with some level of clinical detachment, like this is just some exhibit at the zoo or a nature documentary. _And here we have the pathetic therapist mating in his natural habitat._

But there’s a different kind of satisfaction in watching this, an excitement racing through his blood and pooling somewhere low in his stomach. Right here, he has a power he’s never felt before.

Maruki thinks this is _private._ Maruki thinks he’s _safe_. Maruki would never show this to anyone, much less Goro.

Yet here Goro is, and it feels like the most delicious of victories.

Maruki cries during sex. Of course he fucking cries, tears falling down his cheeks as he thrusts into his friend who, for his part, looks blissed out and dazed.

Maruki cries during sex and closes his eyes and calls someone else’s name when he comes. Those are things that Goro now knows, and Maruki will never, ever know that Goro knows—but _Goro knows._

It’s a strange feeling. It’s incredible.

Maruki looks conflicted about the fact that Shibusawa hasn’t come yet, like he just wants Shibusawa to get out of his apartment so he can cry pathetically by himself. But, wondrous martyr that he is, he takes his friend’s cock in his hand and pumps him until Shibusawa is coming underneath him.

Afterwards Maruki’s hardly even looking Shibusawa in the fucking eye anymore. But Shibusawa seems to take it in stride and seems so perfectly content with Maruki’s offer to let him sleep on the couch if he doesn’t want to go all the way home.

Once they’ve turned the lights off and the apartment is silent, Goro turns off the receiver and slides the binoculars back into his briefcase.

He didn’t get any useful information out of this, certainly nothing he’ll relay to Joker. But it hardly feels like an evening wasted, either.

When Goro touches himself that night, it’s not with images of Maruki and Shibusawa in his head. He’s thinking of what he saw, of course, but it’s not quite what he _saw_ that’s making him more worked up than usual, causing him to moan louder than he ever lets himself.

It’s not like watching porn, the detached pleasure of watching perfect bodies perform for him. It’s not about the people themselves, or the particular acts.

It’s about him: where he is in the scene, and where he _isn’t._ Because he was right there on that roof, solid and real enough that if either of them happened to look out the window and look closely, he’d be caught. But they didn’t see him, they didn’t know and they’ll _never_ know, they thought that private and utterly pathetic moment was theirs alone and Goro has taken that from them, and they can never, ever take back what he’s stolen, what he’s seen—

He’s shaking from that feeling of power as he comes into his hand, and as aftershocks pulse through him, he finds he can’t stop laughing.

  


* * *

  


He does still have a job to do, of course. He returns to the same spot the next night and gets to watch Maruki’s little lap dog once again jump at whatever scraps of affection Maruki tosses to him.

Entertaining as that is, after a few nights of the same it becomes very clear that Goro has learned all he can about Maruki from this particular method of investigation. Maruki has a neat and strict routine these days: he goes to the palace early in the morning and comes back late at night, dedicated as he is to his glorious mission, and the only person he seems to talk to outside of his palace is Shibusawa.

The closest thing Goro gets to a clue is when Shibusawa brings over dinner and tries to pretend at some sort of domesticity as he asks Maruki about his day. When Maruki gives nothing but a tired grunt, Shibusawa gushes, “I’m just so glad you’re able to pursue your research again after they cut it off all those years ago.”

At that Maruki simply smiles and says, “Yes, it seems someone decided to give me another chance,” and says nothing more the rest of the evening.

To get anything more useful, Goro knows he’ll have to start the gritty work of tracing contacts and pursuing records of the legally- and less-than-legally-obtained variety. All he needs for that is his laptop and phone, so he has no reason to leave his apartment. Since he has to wait for various sources and contacts to get back to him once he’s done his initial probing and put out his initial requests, it’s a lot of downtime, a lot of nothing.

But aside from that research he has absolutely nothing else to do. He’s completely alone.

Which is fine. It’s what he’d agreed on. They’d split up after exploring the palace with a mission: Goro would pursue information, Akira would talk sense into his friends. They wouldn’t have any reason to interact at all if it weren’t for sharing a common goal of escaping this damned world.

And the best thing Goro can do to further that mission is staying the fuck away from Akira.

He’d woken up on December 24 with a month-long gap in his memories, his last conscious thought about the irony of staring at himself down the barrel of a gun. So when he woke up, he knew immediately that something was wrong; he was certainly supposed to be dead. But then he turned himself in and spent a week in solitary confinement, which didn’t give him any opportunity to figure out what had happened.

He’d woken up on January 1 to a smiling guard hand-waving why he was suddenly being let go, his past crimes seeming to have disappeared from everyone’s minds. He knew immediately that something was wrong; the world was far too happy. He calmly started some research, looking up basic facts about this world and quietly cataloguing all of the discrepancies. He listened to the people around him on the streets all facing surprising turns of good fortune. 

He went to sleep that night with a solid hypothesis—he’d found himself in some sort of false reality where people got what they wanted—and when he stepped into Leblanc the next morning to see Wakaba Isshiki and a human Morgana, it was all but confirmed. It wasn’t until they met the mastermind himself that Goro figured out precisely why _he_ was here. The world was based primarily on the Phantom Thieves’ ideas of happiness, each of their deepest desires fulfilled, and apparently Akira’s version of a perfect reality is one where his own fucking pity saves the day and Goro’s life. And that sense of pity, that desire to save, won’t just go away; it might just be strong enough to convince Akira to choose this world over the real one.

So along with infiltrating a palace and defeating a deranged therapist, Goro has one very difficult task to accomplish this month: convincing Akira to finally give up on him, telling him that he doesn’t want to be saved. Goro’s hoping waking up the Thieves will speed that right along—surely Okumura and Sakura will have more than a few things to say about Goro’s value as a teammate and human being—but he also has to make it clear that he won’t accept Akira’s pity and will never take his help.

He hasn’t quite figured out how he’s going to do that, but the answer sure as hell isn’t getting any _closer_ to Akira.

So he’ll stay away. Akira will spend the week immersed in a beautiful world where his friends live out their most cherished dreams, and Goro will sit alone in his apartment, and the best case scenario out of all this is that once it’s all over Goro will fucking die.

He doesn’t feel much of anything about that fact. He mostly just feels empty.

Spending a month in this reality where he knows he’s nothing more than a ghost—well, it’s not _bad_ , per se. He finally gets to see what it’s like to live a life without Shido whispering in his ear all the time, without crowds recognizing him daily. It is sometimes pleasant, and therein lies the problem, because life isn’t supposed to be pleasant for Goro Akechi. _Fine_ isn’t a word that should ever apply to him, and the only reason he can feel it now is because he’s not supposed to be here at all.

That’s the feeling that hangs over him every minute of the day when he’s sitting in his apartment doing research on his laptop, staring at the ceiling, and ignoring texts from Akira asking to hang out. A tiredness, a heaviness, an inevitability about all of this that makes him wish it was just over already.

But when he’s sitting on the roof watching Maruki and his utterly pathetic sex life, that feeling goes away. It’s replaced instead with something vibrant and electric—the feeling of being where he’s not supposed to be, getting what he’s not supposed to get, seeing what he’s not supposed to see. Something private and intimate unfolds before his eyes, and he’s a ghost just like he is the rest of the time in this reality—seeing and unseen—but here, rather than emptiness and dread, there’s possibility in that anonymity. He doesn’t have to think, he doesn’t have to perform; he can take everything from these people and give nothing back, a phantom at the edge of their lives, unknown yet undeniably _there._

Well. He can get philosophical about it all he wants, but what it comes down to is it gives him something to do and something to get off on.

Because he truly has nothing better to do. Each night when it starts to get dark, he thinks about responding to any of the mindless texts Akira has sent him throughout the day. Each night he remembers that Akira has spent the entire day with one of his friends, that he may well be planning on reneging on their deal because of how much he likes this new reality where his friends are perfect and Goro is alive but shuffled off somewhere in the background, saved and out of his life.

Each night Goro eventually gets tired of thinking about all that. He puts his phone down and finds somewhere he’s not supposed to be instead.

Sex, it turns out, is everywhere once he knows where to look—and wants to look in the first place. It’s out in the open, with people practically begging for someone to pause for a moment and watch. He’ll wander past an alleyway in Shinjuku late at night and hear muffled grunts, or he’ll linger in the back of a club or the bathroom of a bar, where everyone always thinks they’re far more hidden than they are.

Yes, sex is easy enough to wander upon—but even easier is going out of his way to find it. He thinks back to people he knows, people he hates; it’s a long list. He retraces his steps back to penthouses and mansions Shido had instructed him to visit and finds his way to the homes of politicians he’d been forced to play nice with. He looks through windows at these brutish men as they fuck their mistresses and prostitutes and playthings, and he remembers what it was like to be on the other side of the glass. 

He might stand a little closer to the windows than is safe. He’d love for those people to catch him, to give him an excuse to show them just how much he could hurt them now.

And so he spends the next few days passing time in utter boredom and the next few nights sneaking around the city looking in windows and watching peoples’ secrets play out in front of his eyes.

Of course, he doesn’t always end up lucky enough that someone is home, that their bedroom windows are visible, and that they’re even going to have embarrassing sex for him to watch. For a stakeout on a case or to learn more about one of Shido’s hits, disappointments like those were only to be expected; he was used to having to wait patiently as long as it took to get the job done.

This isn’t work, though—it’s the only thing that passes as fun for him these days, and that makes it less tolerable. And Goro figures that if he’s going to do this window-peeping-pervert thing, he might as well use all the tools at his disposal to be efficient about it.

It’s the last night before he and Akira are supposed to meet back up at Maruki’s palace. Today, Akira was supposed to have finished convincing his friends to reject this world. Goro doesn’t know if he was successful or not because he still hasn’t gotten in touch with Akira all week. He doesn’t need to. They’ll meet up tomorrow. That’s it.

He knows he just won’t be able to sleep, try as he might. And he’s gotten into a routine of sorts—but the thought of finding yet another shuttered window or empty house when he’s looking for something else sounds pretty terrible, too.

So early in the evening, he heads to Mementos.

He wanders the first few shallow floors looking for the shadows of terrible people. Finding specific shadows in Mementos has never been easy for him—certainly not as smooth a process as it is for the Phantom Thieves with Morgana and Futaba to help it along—but it helps that he isn’t looking for anyone in particular right now.

When he finds someone he knows is horrible—because Goro happens to know a lot of the most horrible people in Tokyo—he swiftly ambushes them and holds them up at gunpoint. Then he makes them tell him everything: their fantasies, what they get off on, what they’re hiding.

It’s an incredible feeling, staring down these shadows—staring down someone’s truest self, their cognitive form—and forcing them to tell him, right to his face, things they would never tell a human soul. Things Goro would never be able to learn with just binoculars and hidden microphones. Here, deep in the collective subconscious, lie the deepest of secrets and perversions and fantasies, and with a little brute force Goro can pry it all out into the open for his own perusing pleasure.

Once he’s learned these peoples’ dirtiest secrets it’s hard not to have a little fun with them.

He never beats them up enough to hurt the person in the real world, of course. Just enough to knock the shadow to the ground so it can feel the humiliation of defeat in all the ways that Goro _has_ defeated them. He kicks them to the ground and pins them there with his boot, feeling their whimpers as the rise and fall of a chest under his foot.

He watches them squirm and he reminds them that their true selves will never, ever know that their shadow betrayed them. They’ll never know what Goro knows, or how, and Goro could do anything to them with this information—absolutely anything. The shadows beg, and he grinds his heel into their chests a little just to hear them cry.

The trip to Mementos only takes him a couple of hours and yields a veritable buffet of entertainment options that’ll last at least a week: he knows the exact booth in the exact club where a drunk CEO gets a blowjob under the table every night, knows the precise hotel room where a TV personality is about to cheat on her husband.

He follows up on a few of those leads that night and saves others for the coming days.

And when he returns home at night, the real-life scenes that he’s just witnessed will merge with the memories of their cognitive counterparts begging under his heel and letting out all their dirtiest secrets. Both the shadows and the real life people he watches through his binoculars—they’re all nothing more than ants crawling around for him to peruse, ignorant and worthless and there for him to crush.

  


* * *

  


The next day, a few things of note happen in Maruki’s palace.

He sees Akira for the first time in a week, for one. And—Akira looks like shit, like he’s hardly been sleeping. Worried about his friends and about poor little Yoshizawa, Goro figures. Losing sleep over it. At least he seems genuinely glad to see Goro when he finally does meet his eyes, even if it’s only because meeting Goro means finally saving the people he _actually_ cares about. At least Goro doesn’t have to hide that he’s genuinely glad to see Akira again too.

They go back into the palace. They get their asses handed to them. The Thieves break out of their false realities and come save them just in the nick of time.

They get Sumire back.

Goro should be happy about that. He _is_ happy about that; no one deserves to be controlled by someone who claims they know what’s best. She’s truly come to understand that a harsh reality is better than a false one, and that’s. Good.

He can’t help the bitterness that springs up when he sees how tenderly Akira handles her when they get her back, though, and how openly she expresses her gratitude towards him.

Just another person in Akira’s life who’s more kind and caring and worthwhile than Goro. Goro recognizes that he’s more or less lived out his usefulness at this point—the Thieves are back together again, and with a new member, Violet, to boot. They can most likely handle the rest of the palace without him; he’s sticking to the Thieves like a burr in their sides less out of necessity and more out of a stubborn insistence to see the job done right and to make sure Akira doesn’t change his mind.

That doesn’t make the pointlessness of his remaining days any easier, though.

When they leave Maruki’s palace for the day it’s long since gotten dark. Goro’s a bit sore from being utterly knocked around before the Thieves came to save him and Akira, and he’s emotionally exhausted from having to interact with them for the rest of the day. Following up on any of the leads he got in Mementos the night before seems impossibly wearisome.

All he wants is to not think for just a bit. So he makes his way to the shittiest bar he knows in Shinjuku. The bartender doesn’t even ask the once-famous and decidedly underage Detective Prince to see an ID. Perks of an alternate reality where he barely exists.

He does seem to exist just enough to be a pretty face for people to see in their peripheral vision, though, and a few people send him glances down the bar as he sips his drink. He soaks in the attention and tries to use it to center himself, to remind him who he is and always will be as long as he’s alive in a reality of his own.

He doesn’t mean to snap when a perfectly polite man sits next to him and tries to strike up conversation, but he all of a sudden cannot handle any attention at all—so he downs his drink, mumbles a quick excuse, closes out his tab, and goes to another bar. Then another, once he gets overwhelmed by the slightest bit of attention on him at that one. And another. Maybe he’s gotten more used to being alone and invisible than he thought.

It’s quite late now—Goro hadn’t quite realized how long he’s been sitting at bars staring into space and sipping on refills of his drink—and the streets of Shinjuku are a little bit emptier now. Goro doesn’t want to go home in such a foul mood, but none of the raucous fun that the people still on the streets seem to be having quite interests him, either. So he walks on in the cold night, head slightly down, feeling the crowds thin out as the time ticks closer to three in the morning.

Then he hears a familiar dark chuckle from behind him, and freezes.

_Joker._

No, not Joker—it’s Akira, of course, Akira in his winter jacket and scarf and jeans and a t-shirt, no domino mask and blood red gloves in sight. But even so, as Goro watches him approaching from the other end of the street, he sees it’s Joker’s smile that Akira’s wearing, Joker’s laugh that cuts through the night, and Joker’s fire lighting up his face as he walks down the street and clinging to another man’s side.

A sharp, searing flare of inexplicable rage burns against the already-simmering warmth of alcohol in his system. Goro steps into the shadows between two buildings to let them pass, and as Akira and this person unknowingly step in front of him, Goro takes them in.

The man who Akira is currently holding onto seems to be in this early 30s, though he’s gifted with some features that make him look a bit younger than he likely is: his light hair is long and fine, and it frames the sort of pleasant, open features that might suit an obscure idol. The man is clearly no idol, though—just an average salaryman, recently off of work—but he clearly knows that his looks are good enough that he can act a little bit like one. He’s fairly drunk, and from the way he’s holding Akira’s arm, it’s clear that he came out tonight looking for something specific—and that in Akira, he’s found it.

And Akira—Akira isn’t drunk, but he _has_ been drinking, his voice a little louder than usual and his cheeks slightly flushed. He isn’t wearing anything special; it looks like he hasn’t even changed between leaving the palace and now. But his demeanor is utterly unusual; he’s hanging off this man’s arm like he’s a prize, gazing up at the man admiringly.

The man leads Akira down the street at a quick pace, clearly hasty to get him onto the subway, and Akira is letting himself be lead without any resistance.

Before Goro notices himself doing it, he’s following them. That burst of anger raging inside of him is telling him that Akira might be unsafe—Akira could be drunker than he looks, and this man could be taking advantage of that. He doesn’t doubt that Akira can handle himself, of course, even outside of the Metaverse, but the thought of just leaving Akira in this stranger’s hands feels wrong too.

The salaryman is rambling on about something while leading Akira along.

And then Akira grabs the man by his tie. He yanks the man into an alley. He slams him against the wall, and he crashes their mouths together.

It all happens so quickly that Goro could have missed it if he’d blinked. It’s quick, violent, explosive—it’s everything Joker is, and when he sees Joker go from languid arm candy to a pouncing predator, Goro’s own heart starts racing.

Akira is grabbing the man’s face to kiss him without restraint, and Goro can see every detail because—Akira pulled them into the shadows of the dark alley, but just barely. They’re hardly concealed. They could be spotted easily, if someone just looked into the alley and let their eyes adjust for a second.

Someone like Goro, for example, who is now crouching in the other alley across the narrow street from them.

The other man seems to have been stunned momentarily by Akira’s sudden movement, still working his intoxicated mind around the fact that he is no longer walking towards the subway and is now shoved up against an alley by his once-quiet prey—but now that he’s recovered himself, the pushes Akira away from him, rough hands on Akira’s shoulders keeping him at a distance. He says something rough to Akira, and Akira whispers something back, and Goro isn’t quite close enough to be able to hear either of them. But Goro’s watching, still and ready, his entire body having tensed when the man shoved Akira. If this man does absolutely anything to Akira, Goro’s close enough to jump in, to—

Any coherent thought is immediately wiped away when Goro hears Akira’s dark chuckle again and sees him drop to his knees.

The man’s hand violently pushes Akira’s head towards his groin, and Akira’s hands are quick and certain as they undo his belt. The way the man smirks and fists at Akira’s hair roughly, it’s clear that he thinks he has complete control of Akira.

Goro knows better. Goro doesn’t see Akira there on his knees any more—the person smirking around this moron’s cock is 100% Joker, and Joker always gets exactly what he wants.

Joker works the man’s cock for a bit, bobbing up and down as he puts on an excellent show, before the man yanks Akira back up off his knees just as hard as he’d originally shoved him down. Holding Akira by the collar, he stares him down, and Akira just licks his lips and smirks.

The man turns Akira around and bends him over one of the trash cans lining the alley.

As he fumbles in his wallet to grab a condom, Akira doesn’t waste any time; he pulls out a little tube from his jacket pocket and squeezes what must be lube out then pulls his pants down just enough so he can arch back onto his lubed finger. He’s only had a few seconds to prep himself before the man turns back to him, pins both of Akira’s hands behind his back, and slams into him.

With how little preparation he had, it’s no wonder that Akira shouts loud enough that Goro can hear him from the other side of the sidewalk—and most definitely loud enough that, if there were any passersby, they’d be startled by the noise and turn their heads.

The man shoves Akira’s own scarf into his mouth to keep him quiet, slapping his ass in irritation before continuing to pound into him. Goro can’t hear Akira’s whimpers anymore—but he can see them, as Akira moans around the scarf.

And Goro—Goro is frozen. He doesn’t know what to do, why he’s still here. He didn’t come here to spy, not like the other nights: he only stepped in at first because he was worried Akira was in trouble. It’s clear Akira is fine, that the last thing he’d want is Goro stepping in. Goro should leave.

He steps a little closer, anyway, still fully concealed in his own alley’s shadows but able to get a better look from this angle.

Akira’s eyes are so glazed over with pleasure that Goro doubts Akira would notice if he walked right in front of him. The man growls something into Akira’s ear that just makes Akira moan and lazily nod his head. He holds Akira by the scruff of his neck and pounds into him harder now, forcing Akira’s face onto the filth of the trash can lid—and Joker is loving it.

Finally, after what seems like a painfully long time, the man stills, face screwing up tight and bitter and disgusting as he gives Akira’s ass one final, hard slap, and Akira whines so loudly that Goro can hear its dull echo even around the scarf.

Both are still for a moment as the man catches his breath. Then he pulls out unceremoniously, pulls off the condom, throws it on the ground, buckles himself back up, and leaves without a word. And Akira is perfectly still all the while, still propped up on the trash can.

Once the man turns the corner and is fully out of sight, Akira lets himself simply slide off the trash can and onto the ground.

The way he’s fallen leaves him dangerously close to the street now, just barely in shadows anymore. Anyone could come up and see him easily, lying on the ground completely fucked out with his pants halfway down his thighs. But he just lies there, utterly still on the disgusting, grime-filled alley ground, and Goro is half a second from running over to check on him—

But finally, finally, he moves, bringing his hand to his cock and jerking himself roughly, back arching off the ground into it. It doesn’t take long before he’s coming all over his hand and groaning obscenely into the empty, cavernous echo of the alley.

Akira breathes in heavy pants now, and he collapses and seems to space out again as he lies there with his dick out. It takes him a minute to finally, slowly and clumsily, stand up. He wipes his cum-covered hand on the filthy alley wall, then zips himself up and walks towards the subway as casually as if he’d never made a detour at all.

Goro crouches utterly still as Akira gathers himself up and leaves.

God, Akira must smell like utter shit. No one will say anything on the subway, of course—everyone will have politely ignored far worse smells on the subway before—but they’ll all sigh in relief when this disgusting, grime-covered boy who’s been fucking around in trash-strewn alleys gets off at Yongen-Jaya.

Akira will probably head straight to that bathhouse across the street from Leblanc. Might throw his filthy clothes in at that laundromat, too, while he’s at it. He’ll come home to Morgana all nice and clean and proper, because surely he wouldn’t tell his cat what he just got up to.

And _that_ , really, is the thought that makes Goro so suddenly, desperately aroused. Just thinking about it makes Goro harder than he was even while watching Akira get fucked against the trash can, harder still than seeing Akira take care of himself on the ground like the trash that he is.

No—what Goro truly cannot stop thinking about is that Akira is going to clean himself up. He’ll wash away the evidence, scrub himself up clean and new, and he’ll think that no one knows.

But Goro knows. Goro _saw._

He’s not a desperate slut like Akira, of course; he doesn’t whip his dick out in the wide-open streets of Tokyo. But he can’t deny that by the time he finally makes it through his front door he’s practically tearing his pants off. He doesn’t even make it to the couch, just presses himself against the wall. He’s so hard, and all of him is so explosively warm as he takes himself in his hand and grinds his hips towards the wall and imagines himself behind Joker. He presses his other hand against the wall and thinks of it splayed across Joker’s back, pressing him into the top of a trash can. It only takes a few seconds before he comes hard, across his hand and the wall.

Right after he comes, he can’t help but think about what came next for Akira in that alley. He wipes up the wall and imagines himself leaving Akira in that alley after he was done. Not giving a shit about his pleasure, discarding him like trash to take care of himself pathetically on the ground.

Just the thought of it is enough for Goro to start getting hard again.

  


* * *

  


When he wakes up the next morning, Goro spends a while looking at his texts with Akira. Akira’s texts to him, rather. He scrolls up and down the screen idly through the long log of messages Akira sent all week that he never responded to. Text after text of “hey how’s the research going” and “billiards tonight? i feel like i’ve barely seen you since you got back haha” and “akechi is everything okay?” All meaningless nonsense, Akira feeling some duty to Goro now that he’s returned, the sort of pity he should know better than to expect Goro to tolerate.

Now, though, he has something genuinely worthwhile to talk about.

 **Goro:** I hope you didn’t have Metaverse plans for us today, leader. I’m afraid I don’t think I’m up for any palace exploration. I had quite the night.

Akira responds almost immediately.

 **Akira:** no, all good

 **Goro:** That said, given how strenuously I was worked last evening, an early cup of coffee sounds excellent. It’s been quite a while since I visited Leblanc last.

Goro waits in anticipation and is utterly disappointed when Akira responds in a perfectly normal amount of time and doesn’t seem flustered by the innuendo whatsoever.

 **Akira:** you’re welcome to come over whenever

Akira types, then pauses, then types again before his next message finally arrives:

 **Akira:** i rented a new dvd from the store last night, any interest in watching? not up for much else today tbh

 **Goro:** Not even up for me to dominate you in a game of chess?

 **Akira:** haha sure chess sounds good too

 **Akira:** lmk when you’re off the train, boss can start on your cup so it’s ready for you

It’s frustrating to see how perfectly normal Akira sounds over text, and even worse to see how perfectly normal he acts at Leblanc. He’s clearly been up for a while, ever the fucking early bird even after getting railed in Shinjuku the night before. His glasses are a little fogged up from where he’s working with the steamer, and he’s wearing the dorkiest t-shirt for a 5k race that Goro is certain Akira never ran.

How can Akira act like it’s just a normal Saturday, quiet and slightly bored and as insufferable as ever? How could Goro’s world have tilted entirely on its axis the night before when Akira’s barely even felt a strong wind?

“How have you been spending your free time?” Goro asks in the middle of a chess game that Goro has hardly paid attention to, busy as he is trying to notice any marks on Akira’s skin, any sign of being flustered—anything.

Akira looks up in confusion, and Goro freezes when he realizes that he said that aloud without any consideration. He chuckles slightly, feigns a bit of nervousness and says, “Sorry, perhaps an odd question. I just—hm, how to put this. Living in a constructed reality is such a strange thing, isn’t it? I find myself wondering if it’s even worth enjoying the pleasures of life when it’s all fake—if the concept of pleasure even exists in a world that isn’t truly ours by our own free will.”

Akira softens at that and gives Goro a look that’s concerned but grateful. Goro can’t always count on Akira to naturally volunteer anything about himself, but if it’s under the guise of being helpful it’s slightly more likely. Even after keeping himself away from Akira Goro still finds himself knowing exactly how to converse with him. “Yeah,” Akira says, “I do get that. Nothing feels quite...normal. It’s good to have something stable during such a weird time.”

He pauses, considers Goro for a second, then says, “I’ve actually been hoping to go back to your jazz club. If you’re ever free, we could go.”

 _You sure that wouldn’t be interrupting any late night dick appointments?_ Akechi doesn’t say. Instead he simply gives a reflexively fake smile and says, “It’s pleasing to hear you took such a liking to the place. I am, in fact, free tonight if you’re serious about that offer—though only a little later in the evening, perhaps for the second set?”

The second set starts at ten thirty and goes late; the handful of times they went to the jazz club last year they only ever went for the first set, with Akira always saying he had a rather strict curfew. Now, Goro’s searching Akira’s face for any sign of a reaction—annoyance, maybe, if he’d already planned some sort of hookup for that evening?

Whatever Goro’s looking for, though, he doesn’t get it; instead, Akira gives him a bright, genuine smile, and says, “Let’s do it.”

It’s only after he leaves Leblanc that Goro remembers he’s supposed to be staying the fuck away from Akira. That this is all putting Akira’s dedication to the plan at risk, and that for everyone’s sake—but especially his own—he can’t let Akira indulge in the results of his savior fantasy.

But even worse, his own behavior is a total mystery to him as well. Why exactly was he planting hints and probing to see if Akira would catch on? Just to make Akira sweat a little and wonder if his secret’s safe? If Akira had suspected that Goro knew what he knows...Goro’s not sure what would happen. Akira would hate him more, maybe? That would be a good thing. Akira would pity Goro further for being so horribly messed up? Maybe that would make him wish even more for Maruki’s perfect world, one where Goro had never seen him and one where Goro wasn’t fucked up enough to watch him in the first place.

Cause and effect and possibility and consequence are all mixed up in Goro’s head, and he’s always prized himself on being able to keep even the murkiest set of facts straight. There are just too many variables here; better to keep things as simple as possible, and that means avoiding Akira. No connections, nothing for Goro to fuck up.

He doesn’t cancel on Akira for the jazz club, though—mostly because he can’t stop thinking about what might happen _after_ the jazz club.

Goro should not follow him to see where he goes. Goro _will not_ follow him to see where he goes. Doing so goes against everything he knows he needs to do to ensure this mission’s success.

...But Goro knows he won’t get caught. He survived for years as a supernatural assassin; he knows how to tail someone without them noticing. There’s no possibility that Akira will catch him.

And how thoroughly amusing and utterly satisfying is it to finally know something Akira doesn’t? For once, Joker won’t have all the pieces of the puzzle handed to him on a silver platter. For once, Goro can have something that Akira doesn’t.

Goro spends the rest of the day theoretically working on cases and actually staring at the space above his desk, trying to figure out what he wants and what he’s allowed to have.

He’s been thinking for so long about what Akira might be doing after they meet that by the time he gets to the jazz club and sees Akira waiting at a table, he’s once again surprised to find Akira acting completely normal. A little tired, perhaps—but pleased to see him, making dumb jokes and inane conversation over non-alcoholic beverages.

To try to make up for his earlier out-of-character suggestiveness, Goro stays neutral and calm and utterly sexless. He even took out his fucking sweater vest for the first time in a while.

“Are you okay, Akechi?” Akira asks out of the blue.

Goro tilts his head and smiles. “Of course, Kurusu. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’ve been acting…” Akira is silent for a moment, head tilting perhaps subconsciously to match Goro’s. “Like you used to,” he finishes.

Once, during one of his first ever professional photoshoots, Goro was told that he smiled kind of like a serial killer. It was by some makeup intern who likely meant the best and was probably fired afterward. He’d been having trouble in front of the camera, and when they took a break for repowdering, the intern swept her brush across her nose, and mused in a bubbly voice, “It must be so hard to perform on command like that! Try imagining something really cute, like a kitten that you can’t help but squeal over! It’ll help the smile reach your eyes more, not so much of a serial killer look!” She’d laughed kindly, like it was a funny joke they were sharing. Like it hadn’t made Goro nearly throw up because he’d just caused his first mental shutdown a few weeks earlier. 

Goro knows that his smile now is the one with the same cold, murderous eyes that intern saw all those years ago. He can’t help it—when he’s around Akira, he’s reduced back to that boy sitting in front of a camera for the first time who hadn’t learned how to properly hide behind a mask.

“And what’s what supposed to mean, Akira?” he asks through that cold, cold smile.

Akira doesn’t seem to care about his expression, he just tilts his head a few degrees more, considers for another few seconds, then says, “You’ve been kind of an asshole over the last few weeks. It’s been nice. Now all of a sudden it’s like it’s summer break again and we haven’t seen the worst of each other.”

 _Does he fucking know?_ Is he trying to test Goro in the same way that Goro was trying to test him? To see if Goro will admit to seeing him in his depraved state the night before?

Goro panics internally for just a moment before he really takes in Akira’s expression. There’s nothing there but true concern, nothing mocking or testing at all. Eyebrows knitted, leaning in slightly towards Goro, staring at him unflinchingly in hopes of finding the truth somewhere in his eyes.

Finally Goro gives in, breaking eye contact as he gazes down. “Maybe you’re right, Akira,” he says quietly. A bit stiffly. “As I said earlier today, perhaps it’s been hard to figure out exactly how I’m supposed to behave in a world where everything is suddenly turned upside down.”

Akira smiles sadly and earnestly at him, leaning just a bit closer. “Well, maybe I’m wrong, but it felt like ever since you’ve come back, you’ve been getting closer to not behaving in any way at all. Just being yourself. It’s been nice.”

For a pair of rivals who have tricked and betrayed each other time and again, it’s surprisingly easy to find himself lured into Akira’s orbit over and over.

 _Pity,_ Goro thinks. _He pities you, and if he gets the sense that you’ll accept that pity, he’ll destroy the world to act on it, because that’s who he is._

“I’m sorry Akira,” Goro says, standing up. “I hadn’t realized how late it was getting, and I have a few tasks I need to get to early tomorrow morning. But thank you for inviting me out.”

He doesn’t let Akira get a word in before he heads out the door. Once he’s outside, he takes a bracingly cold breath in. Exhales.

He looks around, and finds a good vantage point—behind a vending machine in an alley, still in eyesight of the front door of the club.

He hides not a moment too soon; Akira emerges from the club moments later, seemingly having been delayed only because he decided to button his coat and tie his scarf. He gives a few half-hearted glances around, like he doesn’t expect Goro to be around but looks anyway. When he sighs his breath escapes into the air as a wispy cloud of mist, and with Akira’s slightly flushed cheeks it is an oddly beautiful sight.

Akira takes out his phone and makes a phone call. Afterwards he takes a deep breath, in and out, just as Goro had on that same corner a minute earlier. Then he takes off towards the subway. He seems—if not exactly happy—at least like he has a renewed sense of purpose. Goro counts to thirty and then follows him.

This time Akira doesn’t head to Shinjuku at all, instead taking the subway in almost the complete opposite direction. He heads to a quiet neighborhood with nice apartments, doormen and elevators and everything. Akira waits outside one of those apartments until a man in pressed chinos and a fussy sweater who looks like he could be a dad comes out.

 _Scratch that_ , Goro thinks when he spots a wedding ring through his binoculars— _probably_ is _a dad._

Goro settles in on a low roof adjacent to the building Akira enters. He’s glad he managed to slip a bug into the lining of Akira’s coat at the club, because he’s not able to see them through any of the apartments’ windows.

He can hear Akira loud and clear through the bug, though—and the first thing he hears, when they’re still in the elevator, is the quiet pressing of lips to skin followed by the most unexpected series of virginal little gasps coming from Akira’s mouth.

Goro was expecting the Joker from last night, the one who’d pulled a stranger into an alleyway by the neck and got fucked over a trash can. That’s not who the person he hears right now, letting out small mewls and gasps and whimpers. 

He can practically hear the innocence and wide-eyed terror that Akira is projecting as he says, quietly, “Are you sure this is okay? I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

“The wife and kids are away for now, honey, don’t worry,” the dad says, cooing over him. “I’ll take care of you. I’ve got you, baby.”

Goro wants to gag, but he can hear Akira practically purr.

Unlike last night’s guy, this man is all gentleness and hesitancy, constantly asking Akira if he likes what they’re doing, if he’s comfortable, if it’s okay. Goro isn’t sure how old the man’s kid is, but he probably has at least some guilt fucking someone with even the small amount of childish softness Akira still has in his features.

That’s probably part of the appeal, though.

And for his part, Akira is putting on a great show of acting like every touch is the first time he’s _ever_ been touched like that. Every time the man asks for permission or asks if he should slow them down, the Joker from last night would have growled and goaded him into going faster, taking more. But this Akira doesn’t betray even a single note of frustration; all Goro hears is pure, needy desperation, small moans of _keep going, please, I’ve never felt so good._

The man comes first, of course, but Akira begs him to stay inside for just a little longer, he’s so full, so close, needs him so badly—

Then the man is whispering soothing words, little “shh”s and “it’s okay, you did so good, honey”s, like he’s soothing a child back to sleep after a nightmare. Goro’s not sure if Akira deserves a goddamn trophy for his acting, or if somehow, the boy who had smeared his own cum across the walls of a dumpster the night before is possibly the same boy now sniffling genuine tears in the arms of a married man.

It’s all very perplexing.

Hot as hell, of course. When Goro thinks about it later that night, he can close his eyes and put vivid images to the things he’d only heard.

But perplexing. A case that he needs far more evidence to solve. So Goro finds himself following Akira, night after night, watching him get fucked all around Tokyo.

The dad, Goro eventually gathers, was something of an outlier, because that’s the only time he sees Akira have sex in a bedroom like a normal person. No, instead he goes to a college party, talks to a girl about the books she’s reading in her sociology class, fingers her on the makeshift living room dancefloor before taking her to an upstairs hallway for more. With her he’s suave and charming, respectful and unthreatening. He’s wearing his glasses.

And the next night Akira’s in the shittiest bar Goro has ever stepped foot in, giving a blowjob in a bathroom stall for everyone to hear exactly how submissive and hungry he is as he begs for the guy’s cock, leaving Goro to imagine from the next stall over just how Akira’s wide eyes are looking up in reverence.

Goro follows him to a secluded corner of a park, listens outside of a janitor’s closet in a museum, watches him through the windows of a convenience store as he ducks down behind the register. There’s no discernable pattern that Goro can sense as to where Akira goes, whether he knows the people he’s fucking or not, and most terrifyingly, who Akira _is_ during these encounters.

It leaves Goro desperate to figure out who Akira really is, what it is he really wants—or if there even is a real truth under all those layers of masks.

He doesn’t miss the hypocrisy of him being the one to think that, of course.

It’s been over a week of following Akira out every night and going to parts of Tokyo he’s never even thought of visiting. (At one point during a dreadful 45-minute subway ride with two transfers Goro wonders how Akira would feel if he knew he was taking Goro on long trips around the city, showing him the sights of Tokyo that Goro’s never bothered to see, a final magic carpet ride before his final death. Then he wonders if all this time on trains at midnight is making him a little delirious.)

But after a week of adventures around the city Akira finally seems to need a break, because he goes to bed early one night like a good little boy. Goro heads back from Leblanc surprisingly frustrated that, for the first time in a rather long while, he’ll have to reuse jackoff material.

Early the next morning, he gets a text from Akira.

 **Akira:** haven’t heard from you all week everything ok?

 **Akira:** want to come over for breakfast? i’ll even get pastries.

Goro tells himself that it would be suspicious if he kept ignoring all of Akira’s texts like he’s continued to do. He needs to keep himself at a distance, but not so much to make him question anything either.

They eat kouign-amanns and drink coffee, and then Akira ropes him into a lazy game of chess. Then somehow they’re watching a movie upstairs in the attic, then playing video games. Goro loses horribly at every single one. Then—on Goro’s suggestion, no less, because every time the day seems to be drawing to a natural close Goro finds himself suddenly anxious and desperate to extend it just a little longer—they get a group together to play some billiards, before he and Akira head off to the jazz club together.

It’s a full day of G-rated family fun, and it leaves Goro giddy at the end of the day. It’s dangerous; he’s indulged himself far too much.

When the lights come up at the end of the set Akira seems genuinely tired from a full day of activity, his cheeks a little flushed from all the exertion when he tells Goro that he had a fun day. Goro thanks him for the company and leaves first, then ducks into his spot behind the vending machine to wait for Akira to depart.

He’s indulged himself too much. But of everything he’s done today, this is the least dangerous part by far. The entire day has been moments that Akira can use to justify Goro needing his pity and wanting to stay in this reality, and Goro will have to find a way to fix that, but for now, this is just for him. He’s been waiting all day to see how this turns out—to see if Akira was just counting down the seconds until Goro finally left him the fuck alone so he could get back to his favorite recreational activities.

But Akira just gets off at the Yongen-Jaya stop as always.

If he’s moving any quicker and with more determination than usual, it must be because he’s exhausted and eager to get to bed. It’s clear that he’s just headed home to Leblanc. Nothing but a detective’s interest in seeing a job through to the end—or maybe just obsession, at this point—inspires him to follow Akira all the way home anyway. Akira unlocks the door and swiftly steps inside the cafe; Goro sighs, and starts to make his way back home.

He hasn’t even made his way to the end of the street when Akira opens the front door to Leblanc again, then throws Morgana out the door and into the night. He hasn’t even turned the lights on in the cafe—all Goro can see is an arm chucking the cat outside. Morgana howls, an utterly indignant and thoroughly cat-like screech sounding as he lands on his feet, shouting that Akira can’t just wake him up and throw him out like that without a reason—but Akira doesn’t respond, doesn’t even seem to hear him anymore as he closes and locks the door behind him.

Goro crouchesin the laundromat alley, waiting for Morgana to finish his complaining and attempts at opening the door. Finally, Morgana smooths out his fur before making his way down the street to the Sakuras’ house in disgust.

Only then does Goro carefully tiptoe out of the alley and closer to the cafe—before he hears a deep, agonized sound out of the attic’s open window.

It’s a terrible idea. A horrible idea. But Goro knows the cat isn’t in there to see him, and this lock is an easy one to pick.

The chimes above the door sound, and Goro cringes at the sound, but there isn’t anything he can do about it aside from opening the door as little and as quietly as possible.

Judging by the continuous stream of moans he’s hearing from upstairs, though, the attic’s occupant isn’t in any state to hear a careful intruder.

Goro closes the door and takes his shoes off to walk across the cafe floor. He reaches what he knows will be the trickiest part: the stairs. His steps are slow and deliberate, each one a challenge—and it’s only made worse by the sounds of rustling and groaning and wet, obscene slaps from just meters away that already have Goro semi-hard in his pants. But Goro takes his time, spending a full half minute letting his weight shift onto each step.

Finally he’s climbed just enough of the stairs to be able to peek through the railings. All the lights are still out, and with the way shadow falls across the staircase, it’d be impossible for Akira to see him.

And fuck, if what he sees isn’t worth the risk, anyway.

Akira seems to have worked himself open with prodigious speed, because he’s already riding a dildo that’s vibrating so loudly, any noises he made downstairs must have been drowned out. He’s fully naked, his clothes hastily thrown across the floor. One of his hands grips the base of the dildo, holding it so he can grind his hips onto it in a rhythmless, frantic up and down. He runs his other hand roughly through his hair, then gives it a harsh tug and makes himself moan.

Goro’s own cock twitches in his pants.

Akira grinds down again, groaning, and it’s all Goro can do to grasp the stair railings tightly to keep himself from moving, from reacting—because when Akira shifts to push himself even deeper onto the toy, the bright moonlight from the open window hits his chest to show long scratch marks across his stomach and down his sides. He hasn’t quite broken the skin there, but it’s a close thing, given the dark red marks across his sweat-shining skin.

Akira’s cock is rock-hard and utterly neglected, as if he’s refused to touch it, refused to do anything but grind into the toy in his ass. The hand that’s in his hair starts slowly moving down his body. He runs his fingers down his neck with a featherlight touch, then gently across his nipples in soft, deliberate circles. His fingers don’t linger in any one place for long, moving down across his stomach and sides to brush over the scratches in a way that makes him shiver. Then down his hips and over his thighs, avoiding his cock even as it twitches at the nearly-there sensation and leaks precum from the tip.

Instead, his fingers move gently down his inner thigh, caressing the soft, creamy skin there, all the way down to the inside of his knee, right where his legs are bent under him.

And then he tears his fingernail up his thigh, scratching _hard_ , digging into that soft skin enough to make himself _bleed._ He convulses on the dildo as he does, losing himself as he throws his head back and moans, “Ah—Akechi!”

Goro’s heart stops for a moment. He’s certain he’s been caught.

But no—Akira’s eyes are closed, have been the whole time. He’s just babbling the name quietly now, whimpering “Akechi, Akechi, Akechi,” as his nails keep digging mercilessly into his skin. They’re everywhere now, scratching hard and fast back up his hips and stomach and chest, and when his fingers finally return to his nipple, he pinches hard at the same time as he slams onto the dildo at just the right angle to make him _scream._

Goro is so hard it hurts. It’s all he can do to grip the stairwell and keep from touching himself.

Akira has slowed his grinding to complete stillness, and slowly, he blinks his eyes back open, his eyelids still heavy with stimulation as he looks down at himself. He gazes at his body like he hadn’t realized how scratched up he is, how flushed and hard his cock is, and he lets out a husky whisper of “Please, Goro”—and only then does he finally take his cock in his hand and stroke.

The moan he lets out when he finally touches himself is utterly shameless, and fuck, he’s right next to the open window. Surely the entire neighborhood must be able to hear—but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to moan, his wordless sounds slowly morphing into an endless stream of “Goro, Goro, Goro.”

Each time he hears his name fall from Akira’s lips, Goro feels his cock twitch and swell even more painfully against the tight restraint of his pants.

When Akira pulls his own hair again and gives a choked-off “Goro” that turns into a half-sob is when Goro finally decides, _fuck it._ He takes a hand from the railing and palms himself through his pants. The friction is good enough to almost make him shout—only squeezing the railing tighter than ever keeps him from doing so—but it’s also desperately, wildly not enough.

Not when Akira is right there, naked and beautiful and crying out _his name._

It is without a doubt the hottest thing that Goro has ever seen.

Slowly, Akira picks up his pace on the dildo, slamming down onto it steadily. All the while, his vocabulary has gained a few words: not just “Goro,” now, he’s also muttering “please” and “fuck” and “yes, yes, I’m close, Goro, I—”

He lets out a strangled sound as he scratches himself full across the chest, his deepest scratch yet, and he comes in spurts onto his sheets.

God, the sight is absolutely transcendental, and seeing Akira squeeze his eyes shut in overwhelming pleasure nearly throws Goro over the edge too, a second from coming as he rubs himself through his pants.

He palms himself faster and harder, and Akira is heaving for breath, head thrown back in the relief of complete release, and he opens his eyes and lazily sweeps his hazy gaze across the room—

Goro comes, and Akira’s gaze passes over him right where he’s standing. Goro is frozen, holding himself as still as he can all while he shakes helplessly while cum fills his pants in spurts and terrified pleasure zips through his body. Goro’s heart stops, because Akira has seen him, Akira has caught him, Akira is looking right at him—

No. Akira doesn’t show any sign of recognition at all. Goro is too deep in the shadows, and Akira’s lazy sweep of the room continues, not fixing on anything in particular. They eventually close sleepily, fully blissed out. Honestly, Goro’s not certain that Akira would know he was there if Goro stepped right in front of him with how clouded over and out of it he is.

Akira collapses on the bed, eyes still shut as he pulls his legs up and tugs the dildo out of his ass with a small, tired groan.

He lets himself lay still for a minute before he stands up and starts to clean himself up.

He has to change the sheets, having come all over them, and the rustling of the sheets as Akira faces away from the stairwell gives Goro the opportunity to slip down the stairs and away from Leblanc.

His heart is still racing. He knows he wasn’t caught. It was too dark for Akira to see him, and Goro’s head was barely peeking over the floor, and Akira was far too out of it to notice anything at all.

But fuck, what if he _had_ been caught?

Goro keeps replaying that moment when he thought he was caught—when he wasn’t caught, but could have been—and his heart rate spikes every time he remembers.

It’s enough to make him hard again, just thinking about it.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Akira:** hey akechi! how’s it going_

The next day Goro has a minor breakdown.

He’s a detective. Or was, anyway, even if it was all somewhat of a farce. He knows how to hold the disparate facts of a case in his mind all at once, synthesizing seemingly intractable contradictions and impossibilities together to turn them into a workable theory. It’s what he’s always done best.

But he has no idea what to do with the facts he has or the conclusion they add up to. 

The facts are these: First, Akira Kurusu spent all of yesterday with him and then furiously masturbated while calling out Goro’s name. This one has a natural corollary: Akira Kurusu wants to fuck Goro Akechi. It's understandable; Goro is without a doubt the most attractive person Akira knows, even in a sweater vest and chinos. 

Second: Akira Kurusu has fucked half of Tokyo by this point. Being desired carnally by Akira Kurusu does not make Goro Akechi special. If anything, it makes him _less_ special, just another meaningless fuck in Akira's whorish conquest of Tokyo.

Third: Goro Akechi is trying his very hardest to erase his existence by the end of the month. Being desired by Akira Kurusu in any way, even if it means less then nothing to Akira himself, will only ever be a hindrance to that end. And desiring him back can only make things even worse.

Those are the facts he has. Where they leave him, Goro doesn’t know. Where they leave _Akira,_ Goro knows even less.

The only thing he can make sense of—the only thing that seems _safe_ —is that he needs to _stay the fuck away from Akira._

  


* * *

  


_**Akira:** i have a few hours free tonight, want to hang out?_

Goro studiously ignores Akira’s texts. Not that Akira is texting him any more than usual—Goro’s been paying attention, trying to search for any hints that Akira might have seen him the night before, but his messages are as regular and banal as ever. But Akira acting normally doesn’t change Goro’s resolve at all; if anything, it heightens it, reminding Goro that he’s safe—but if he doesn’t stay the fuck away he might not be in the future. So he ignores Akira’s texts throughout the day.

He does spy on him, though. Following Akira is safe; following Akira is something he knows. Akira had written in the Phantom Thieves’ group chat earlier that he and Sakamoto were going to train at the gym if anyone wanted to join. Goro does not want to join, not in the slightest, but knowing Akira’s location through the evening gives him a good launching off point to see what Akira gets up to for the evening.

Akira and Sakamoto emerge from the gym, exchange a sweaty fist bump, and part ways, but instead of heading straight to the subway Akira stops at the 777 on Central Street. Goro waits across the street and watches.

When Akira emerges he stuffs the baggie of his purchases into his bag alongside a grumbling Morgana before tossing the receipt in the trash. He doesn’t notice when the receipt flitters past the can’s opening and to the ground, so once Akira has rounded the corner towards the station Goro picks it up.

The receipt is for a 20-pack of condoms, a bottle of lube that costs more than Goro knew you could spend on lube at 777, and a melon pan.

“Of _fucking_ course,” Goro snarls under his breath, crumpling the receipt and throwing it back to the ground petulantly before catching Akira’s trail again.

Akira goes to Leblanc. This isn’t anything new—Akira usually comes back from whatever he’s been doing in the evening, drops Morgana off, and takes some time to get ready before going off on his little adventures.

Instead of Akira heading back out the door a few minutes later, though, an arm opens the door and out steps Morgana—reminiscent of the night before, only now Morgana walks out of his own accord. He looks happy enough as he trots over to the Sakuras’ house while saying something about fatty tuna.

Goro’s starting to get a bit of a tight, clenching feeling in his stomach that makes him angry.

But he’ll give Akira some allowance. Maybe he’s just taking some extra time to get dressed up for his outings tonight, and he’ll be out the door soon enough.

Akira doesn’t step out the door for a full half hour. And when he does, it’s only to stick his head out of Leblanc and look up and down the street, brow furrowed. He checks his phone once, looks up and down the street again, and closes the door, heading back upstairs.

Goro doesn’t want to stick around for whatever happens next. When he’s sure Akira is gone, Goro steps out of his hiding spot and walks out of Yongen-Jaya as quickly as he can.

He shouldn’t feel jealous. He shouldn’t feel this _possessiveness._ He’s spent the last week watching Akira fuck random strangers all around Tokyo, and this is just more of the same, exactly what he expected.

Only—tonight it’s happening in Leblanc. Akira isn’t going to a bar or some house party or a fucking alley on the side of the road—he’s bringing whoever he’s going to fuck to his _home._ He bought condoms and 777’s finest lube and will probably make whoever this fucker is coffee after they’re done, and—

And it’s fine. It doesn’t matter.

Goro goes out to Mementos to beat up shadows that night but his heart isn’t quite into it. When he gets home, he doesn’t think about any of them writhing pathetically under his boot as they tell him their depraved secrets. The only thing he can think of—maybe the only thing he’ll ever be able to think of for the rest of his life when he’s laying in bed touching himself—is Akira in the attic, Akira grinding into the mattress, Akira scratched up and bloody from his own fingernails, Akira, Akira, Akira…

Akira, sharing that mattress with someone else now.

  


* * *

  


_**Akira:** uh maybe my messages aren’t getting through to you but i sent you a few yesterday_

_**Akira:** anyway i’m free again tonight if you wanted to hang out_

The next night, Goro follows Akira back to Leblanc once again, and once again Akira stays at Leblanc. Goro leaves immediately after Akira lets Morgana out; he doesn’t need to wait around to see who comes over.

He doesn’t go out to Mementos or to watch anyone else either. Instead he buys a bottle of whiskey and drinks half of it that night. It feels almost like disappearing. It’s a more pleasant feeling than anything else he’s felt over the last few days.

His body starts feeling numb, like his hands are his and not his at the same time. He thinks a little about his body—his real one, the one that bled out in the Metaverse and then disintegrated into cognitive nothingness with Shido’s palace. He pinches himself on the arm hard enough to bruise and wonders what will happen to this body when it, too, ceases to exist at the end of the month.

He’s starting to feel less and less existential dread for that and more impatience for it to hurry up and happen already.

* * *

_**Akira:** i got some tickets to the aquarium if you were ever interested in going back_

_**Akira:** the exhibits change every so often you know_

A bit later, there’s a message in the Phantom Thieves chat:

_**Akira:** we’re going to mementos today. meet after school at leblanc._

There’s also a text from Akira to him directly:

_**Akira:** will you be there after school?_

_**Goro:** Of course, leader._

_**Akira:** why have you been ignoring every other message i’ve sent akechi_

Goro chooses not to respond to that one.

They go to Mementos. Goro is distracted, to say the very least.

He’s utterly unable to keep his eyes off of Joker. Joker, who twists and twirls and smirks at enemies as he takes them down and _god,_ has he always been this _obnoxious_ when fighting?

Because the way he moves, the sound he makes when he gives or takes a particularly satisfying hit, the things he says to shadows when he has them at his mercy begging for their lives—now that Goro’s seen what Akira looks like naked and moaning and pleading, he’s unable to see anything else.

The worst part is that Joker knows Goro’s distracted. _Everyone_ knows Goro’s distracted and no one knows why. They’re all waiting for their leader to make the decision to switch Goro out of the front lines for someone who can focus on the mission at hand. Embarrassing, for him, but it’s happened to all of them. They all have their bad days resulting in decreased performance; no one takes it personally.

But Joker doesn’t do that. He keeps Goro right at his side, and every time Goro slips up, Joker gives him a pointed look before making up for the mistake as showily as he can. It’s infuriating.

The team reaches a safe room. The air is tense, but for once Goro doesn’t feel like he’s the sole cause. As they patch each other up and eat snacks, they’re all waiting for their leader without quite looking at him.

When everyone’s recharged and ready to move, Joker finally clears his throat and says, “Let’s get ready to go. Queen, could you lead the team down to the next floor and see if our target is there? I need to talk to Crow.”

Everyone seems to let out a collective sigh of relief. Goro’s suddenly on high alert.

He needs to act calm. He needs to act normal. Nothing has changed as far as Joker knows, because Joker does not know that Goro saw him—not at Leblanc and not any of the other nights.

“No,” Goro says bluntly.

But Joker also wants to fuck him, so this can only end poorly.

“No?” Joker asks with a raised eyebrow.

“I—” Goro looks back at the others, but they’re all looking at him with varying levels of anger for preventing Joker from fixing whatever’s messing up their teamwork. “That is, surely you can say whatever it is in front of everyone. I assure you that whatever it is, I won’t take it personally.”

“Oh, but it’s a _very_ personal matter, Crow,” Joker says with a smirk. The rest of the team is already headed towards the escalators.Goro feels like the walls are closing in a little. He _cannot be left alone here with Joker._

“Wait!” Goro shouts, a little louder and a little more frantic than he really means to. The rest of the group pauses and looks back. “What do you have to say, Joker,” Goro snarls through clenched teeth.

At least a few people stay now. It’s Ann, looking concerned, and Kitagawa, looking confused, but it’s something.

And Goro must really look like he’s moments from giving someone a mental breakdown, because Joker’s wide-eyed and nervous. It’s not a look Goro’s used to seeing on him.

“I just wanted to ask if you’re okay,” Joker finally says quietly.

“I’m _great._ Never better.”

Joker takes a deep breath, then says, “Fox, swap into the front line. Crow, take support.”

Everyone else lets out a sigh of relief. Goro just feels hollow.

  


* * *

  


That night, Akira finally leaves Leblanc after dropping Morgana off—which is good, because if Goro had to face Akira having his mystery date over again he’d probably finish off his bottle of whiskey, and he’d rather not have quite as bad a hangover as he did this morning.

Akira goes on what Goro would have labeled the week before as his “standard” escapade: going to a bar, picking someone up, and blowing them in an alley. Goro watches.

Does Akira ever think about these people again, once he’s through with them? Goro’s seen enough to know that he often won’t even ask for their names, but even the ones who he puts a little more thought into finding on the internet and meeting he seems to toss aside after getting what he wants.

Is that what will happen to Goro at the end of the month? He’s never given a shit about a legacy or remembrance or anything other than taking his bastard father down, but he also remembers his final moments on that ship as he stared down the barrel of his own gun and could grin in the face of death for one simple reason: Akira had promised. Akira was going to remember him.

And then he came back, and it had to be because Akira wanted him back, and so Goro thought—even without knowing he was thinking it—that made him special.

But is that what this guy thinks? This guy Akira’s on his knees for in an alley, this guy who Akira kisses fiercely, who Akira says makes him feel amazing like he’s never felt before, this guy whose name Akira doesn’t know and whose face he won’t be able to pick out of a lineup tomorrow morning—is he looking down at beautiful Akira on his knees for him and thinking he’s special, too?

When this month ends and this long night is over and Akira wakes up on the morning of February 4, will Goro be just as forgotten?

That hollowness Goro’s been feeling lingers on, and on, and on.

  


* * *

  


A few nights later, Goro sips a drink from one end of the dark, packed club watching Akira sit at the bar on the opposite side and reject his third suitor in a row.

He’s being far more discerning than Goro’s ever seen him be before, and Goro can’t figure out _why_. It’s not as if the prospects thus far have been unappealing: three objectively attractive and desirable people have propositioned Akira, and each time he’s turned them down.

Goro doesn’t blame the three for trying, of course. Akira is looking, quite frankly, stupid hot tonight. He usually goes out for his trysts in his usual jeans and a t-shirt; he sometimes doesn’t even change out of his school uniform. But tonight he’s gone all out to fit the vibe of this club—black from head to toe, a sleeveless shirt and skinny jeans and what must be eyeliner framing his glasses-less eyes. All dressed up just to sit there sipping a drink boredly at the bar as he rejects prospect after prospect.

After what must be over half an hour he finally settles on someone—but at that, his strange behavior only becomes even stranger, because the man Akira chooses is completely ordinary. He’s far less attractive than the ones he’s already rejected: a little on the thin side, a little pale, hair a little too long.

Akira doesn’t waste his time now that he’s chosen a target; they go to the dance floor, moving in time to the beat, and it doesn’t take long before Akira maneuvers in front of his partner to grind his ass against the man’s front. His hips are mesmerizing, as is the way the rest of his body follows them in smooth, sinuous motions. The way he moves against his partner is reminiscent of the way he moved the day before in Mementos, which is reminiscent of the way he moved riding his toy a few nights ago, and the association means Goro can’t help but get hard watching. Akira moves back and forth on the man’s lap, grinding into what must certainly be a hard-on.

Then comes the sloppy makeout, their bodies still pressing into each other to the music’s unrelenting tempo. Akira latches onto the man’s neck with his teeth, making the man throw his head back to groan for more, but the sound is completely lost beneath the thumping of the music. No one pays any mind as Akira’s hand moves under the man’s shirt to caress his torso, nor as his hand works its way down into the man’s pants.

But they so easily _could._ Goro’s a testament to that—he’s not particularly close to them, sitting in his own dark corner, but with just a little focus it’s so easy to _see_ Akira and his partner standing near the crowd’s edge. If it’s so easy for Goro to see, it’d be easy for anyone else to see—but Akira goes on brazenly sliding down the man’s pants to grasp his cock; the man humps into Akira’s hand shamelessly..

Akira must do something right because suddenly a few people near them look over at the two but then purposefully look the other way. Their writhing together loses the tempo of the song and starts moving to the frantic tempo of the man’s pleasure until Akira finally stills and gives the smirk of a job well done.

He slowly takes his hand out of the man’s pants, raises it to his mouth, and licks off all the evidence, giving the man a sultry, cum-flavored kiss before retreating from the dance floor with a wink.

He doesn’t go far—just back to his seat at the bar to order another drink. He’s back to sipping slowly and looking around the club expectantly, tapping his foot against the empty barstool beside him.

 _Already ready for another, huh,_ Goro thinks. Except a few more people _do_ come up to Akira—Akira, whose cheeks now have a lot more color and whose hair is messy and who is even more alluring now—but he turns them all down.

_Picky, picky._

Akira sits at the bar with an empty seat next to him, stirring his drink and taking idle sips for at least fifteen minutes. Until finally he picks out another target, repeats his little exercise on the dance floor again, and sits back down. Waits. Looks around.

It’s when Akira’s on his third partner and Goro’s on his fifth or sixth drink that he has a realization.

He has an instinct for pattern recognition, after all. Unlike during Akira’s past escapades, his hookups tonight have all been men. Their temperaments and dress and attitudes have ranged from put-together and polite to off-putting and cold, but all sharing a common _look_ : longer hair, a leaner body type, and—

 _Oh._ Akira has a type.

Things make a lot more sense now. 

Like why he’d been calling out Goro’s name that night at Leblanc, something Goro has tried and tried to not feel anything about. Akira had just been hanging out with Goro all day, sohe was at the top of his mind when he got horny that night. And Goro might be a particularly attractive exemplar of a type, but that’s all he’ll ever be—a type. High-quality jerk-off material that fills a niche.

This should be making him feel better. This _should_ be making him feel better. He doesn’t have to worry about any appropriate attachments Akira might have towards him that might compromise his decision about defeating Maruki.

Goro’s starting to realize it might not be _Akira_ who’s the problem here.

By the time he closes out his tab, Goro’s had more drinks than he remembers ordering. He’s tried to keep up with Akira, one drink each time he goes to the dance floor, one drink to match Akira’s own when he sits at the bar with the seat next to him empty as he waits for his next mark. But by the time he closes out his tab Goro realizes that no matter how many drinks he downs, it doesn’t get less painful to see Akira chasing his pleasure in people like him. To know that he could slide up into that empty bar stool next to Akira and fit right into the line, just another one in Akira’s endless stream of bodies, meaning no more to him than the person who came before or the person who will come after.

It’s a horrible, aching pain. The worst part is knowing that he’ll come back tomorrow night to follow Akira wherever he goes, and then the night after, and the night after that for more of the same torture, because it’s something other than the hollowness that follows him in every other moment.

  


* * *

  


“Are you Hisashi Satou?”

The man sneers at Joker. “That’s right. Are you one of those Phantom Thieves? Here to change my miserable heart?”

Joker nods. The man starts in on a typical Shadow monologue—”No one understands what true love looks like any more, those boys told me they were of age—” but the strangest part is that Joker just nods along and lets him go on far longer than he usually would before initiating a fight.

That’s hardly the weirdest thing that’s going on here, though; far weirder is that Joker is here in Mementos at all, late at night, alone.

Going to Mementos alone isn’t impossible; Goro’s certainly done it plenty of times himself. There’s a reason he’s only stuck to the top few layers of Mementos for his recent recreational pursuits, however. Each level brings new difficulty for navigation and shadows that are far trickier to take solo. When Goro was doing jobs alone for Shido, it would be rare if he could take down more than one target per trip, with the hours it would take to find the target relying on just his vague sense of “ _it feels like they’re probably lower, though whether that means one floor down or twenty, can’t say_ ” and with solo shadow battles being a long, exhausting, drawn-out affair. Loath as he was to admit it, the Thieves took to Mementos far, far better than he did—they’d take down six or seven targets a night, along with dozens of weak shadows that they just ran over with the Monabus. It was frustrating to understand just how inefficient working alone was.

Joker hardly seemed frustrated, though. He’d left Leblanc without Morgana and headed straight for Shibuya, then strolled on in to Mementos easily. Clearly, this wasn’t a typical late-night hookup. That only made the situation more curious—and potentially dangerous—and as his teammate, Goro felt somewhat obligated to make sure Joker was okay.

So he followed him floor after floor, slipping around corners and through the shadows of dark corridors without stopping to take out any of the weak shadows lingering anywhere. It was like he was taking a nice midnight stroll through the collective subconscious, except Joker evidently had a purpose.

And now that he’d found that purpose, Goro had no idea what the fuck was going on. Hisashi seemed like a totally normal Mementos shadow, an ordinary encounter that they could take care of as a group the next time they visited. Why did he need to do this alone?

Joker faces the man’s shadow across an empty subway platform, and Goro hides behind a station pillar a safe distance away, watching him take in his target thoughtfully.

When Hisashi seems to have finally finished monologuing, he sneers back at Joker and says, “Aren’t there supposed to be more of you thieves here to steal my rotten desires?”

Joker walks up to him slowly and without breaking eye-contact, staring him down with the murderous intent of a predator. Hisashi is sane enough to get a little nervous at that look, starting to back up, but he doesn’t have many places to go—and then Joker has his hands on his shoulders and says, “Who said anything about stealing your desires?”

Hisashi’s eyes have gone wide as Joker’s gloved hands start moving down the man’s front, slowly unbuttoning his shirt. Hisashi isn’t terribly unattractive, Goro notes—not Joker’s type, Goro thinks, but Joker doesn’t seem to mind.

“I didn’t come here as a Phantom Thief,” Joker says with a devilish smile. He slowly and seductively pulls off his long black coat, and by the time it finally falls to the ground, Goro’s pulse is absolutely _racing_. Somehow, taking off the coat and revealing the sleeveless top underneath that shows Joker’s toned, porcelain white arms makes it feel like Joker is almost as naked as he was the night in the attic, vulnerable and revealed in his true form.

“Your desires—you’re a connoisseur of beauty, a lover of a good performance,” Joker croons, whispering in Hisashi’s ear so softly that Goro can barely hear him. “No, I don’t want to steal them...what if I told you that I want them all focused on _me?”_

Hisashi just looks stunned, gaping around his inability to form words; Joker chuckles, using his body and his hands on Hisashi’s shoulders to guide the man towards the lone bench on the subway platform. It’s slightly closer to where Goro’s hiding but far enough away that his position isn’t jeopardized—it’s just close enough for Goro to have the perfect view as Joker pushes Hisashi down so that he’s sitting on the bench before he leansover him and whispers, “I can put on a great show.”

Hisashi groans—and then they groan in unison as Joker straddles Hisashi and grinds their hips together.

“God,” Hisashi groans, trying to get his hands around Joker’s slim waist—but Joker’s too quick for him, already slipping out of his grasp and dropping between Hisashi’s knees onto the subway’s harsh concrete.

Goro’s inadvertently found himself the second best seat in the house—Hisashi has the best, of course, but Goro can see almost as well when Joker looks up and gives Hisashi a pleading, seductive look as he bats his dark, beautiful eyelashes. All the while, his hands are making quick work of the shadow’s pants, pulling them off his legs to reveal the man’s thick cock. Joker laps at the tip with a groan, keeping his eye contact all the while, and he moans like he’s just tasted the sweetest of nectars.

“Fuck,” Hisashi seethes, and Goro can relate—he must be just as hard as Hisashi is, watching Joker’s sweet pink tongue dart out and gather all the precum at the tip of Hisashi’s cock before swirling all around the tip.

Hisashi groans and grips the sides of the bench hard, as if he’s trying to hold himself back for some godforsaken reason. At that, Joker hums around his cock contemplatively, then takes Hisashi’s hand and guides it to his own thick mop of curls.

That’s all the warning Hisashi gets before Joker takes him all the way down his throat. When Hisashi shouts, bucks his hips up, and grabs Joker’s hair _hard_ in response, Joker only smiles and moans around his cock, and that must feel even _better,_ because all Hisashi can say is “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Joker takes Hisashi down his throat again and again, and only when Hisashi has started really pulling at his hair does Joker pull off his cock with an obscenely wet noise.

Joker’s eyes are wide and sparkling and satisfied, his unhinged grin dripping with saliva and precum, lips shiny and puffy, hair flying in all directions—right now, Joker is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.Hisashi must agree, because he lets out a groan that thankfully covers up the small one Goro can’t help let escape his lips. He’s so fucking hard, his cock trapped in the tight discomfort of his bodysuit.

“Want me to keep going?” Joker asks, his voice harsh and throaty, and Goro only just catches himself from groaning again. This is a thousand times better than every time he’s seen Joker give a blowjob before—because he’s seen Joker wrecked, flushed and bruised around a cock, sure, but he’s never been able to _hear_ the results like he can now, like Joker’s whispering in his own ear.

Hisashi nods fervently—and that makes Joker chuckle with a smirk as he crawls back up to Hisashi’s lap, kissing him obscenely. Hisashi’s startled by it, and that allows Joker to push him backwards so that he’s fully reclined on the bench.

“Too bad,” Joker says. “I didn’t come here just to get a taste. Someone like you, someone who knows how to treat boys like me—what a waste that’d be.” He’s sitting right on Hisashi’s cock now and grinding deeply, Joker’s clothed pants clearly causing a lot of harsh friction against Hisashi’s bare cock, and it makes Hisashi writhe and let out ugly noises. “Can you guess what I _really_ came here for, Hisashi-sama?”

“I—ah—”

Hisashi isn’t capable of coherent words anymore with the way Joker’s relentlessly grinding, so Joker finally takes pity—he stills, takes Hisashi’s face in both his hands, and says, with the utmost seriousness in his eyes, “I want you to _fuck_ me.”

That makes something hungry and pathetic light up in the shadow’s eyes—like he’s won something, not like he’s been given a gift. Joker doesn’t seem to mind; he just smiles as he stands up and pulls his obscenely tight pants off.

He arches back and reaches behind himself, and both Hisashi and Goro go wide-eyed to see him pull out a black plug. Joker groans when it slides out of his hole with a slick popping noise, and he tosses it away carelessly, where it rolls to a stop just a few feet away from Goro.

He glances down and sees that it’s slick and coated with lube, and it must still be warm from keeping Joker nice and full and stretched out this whole time, _fuck—_

Joker slowly, slowly lowers himself onto Hisashi’s erect cock, and they groan together as he does, Hisashi letting out a deep grunt while Joker wails a mewling cry. When he’s finally seated all the way on his cock, Joker gives Hisashi a wild, wide-eyed grin, and Hisashi has to be an absolute idiot if he still thinks that he’s the one with the power in this situation.

No— _Goro_ is the one with the power in this situation, he has to remind himself. He’s the one watching all of this without Joker knowing, he’s the one who’s always a step ahead of Joker, etcetera, etcetera.

Really, though, it’s hard to focus on any of those pseudo-intellectual justifications he always reminds himself of, particularly when it comes to following Joker around and feeling disgusted with himself afterwards. None of that feels relevant at this moment when he’s just as much under Joker’s spell as this pathetic shadow is.

God, with all those nameless and worthless people he watched before—Maruki and what’s-his-face, Shido’s nameless men, all the faceless people he came across on the streets—it was never the sex itself that got him hard. It was always the _after_ , the reminiscence later on of just how powerless they were as he watched that turned him on, and that’s how it was supposed to go, so _don’t you dare,_ he thinks to his dick as he feels it pulsing painfully hard against the constricting material of his suit each time Joker raises and lowers himself onto Hisashi’s cock with a lewd moan.

 _Don’t you dare,_ he thinks, because just starting to brush his fingers over the front of his pants makes him nearly hiss with pleasure and that’s _not what he’s supposed to be here for,_ even if part of him knows that he hasn’t been detached about any of this since the first time he saw Joker in that alley.

 _You hold even more power over him if you’re getting off on watching him without him knowing, too,_ the part of him that can always justify a bad decision whispers. Its interference is hardly necessary. Just one brush of his fingertips over his cock sealed his fate; now he needs friction as he watches this like he’s never needed anything before.

The subway bench has creaks each time Joker slams down onto Hisashi’s cock as he drives a hard and intense pace. Hisashi is left laying on the bench with his head thrown back, thoroughly and helplessly along for the ride.

Joker, meanwhile, has one hand on Hisashi’s chest to steady himself and touches himself all over with the other—threading it through his hair, tracing up his bare arms, snaking his fingers under his shirt to feel his stomach and hips—everywhere but his own hard, leaking cock.

 _He’s teasing himself just like he was the other day,_ Goro realizes, _and riding this man just like the dildo in his room._ The realization makes Goro flush even harder, and as Joker’s thighs clench and work to push him up and down punishingly hard, Joker throws his head back and moans with abandon just like he did that night. Goro could swear that among his moans are breathy, barely-there syllables of “G—ah, G-Gor—ah.”

When he hears that, Goro can’t help but palm himself a little harder, pleasure and frustration singing through his body in equal measures. He doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to think about what it means, why he’s torturing himself, because—

Because he realizes that, for the first time since seeing Akira at Leblanc, he’s _enjoying_ himself. This isn’t forcing himself to watch Akira show with his body just how little Goro means to him; this isn’t staying and watching Akira prepare for a date or fuck lookalikes in a club precisely because it makes him hate himself a little more each time. For the first time in so long, it’s pleasurable. As much as he knows it’s not the case, he can pretend, just for a little, that this is just for him—him, and his unknowing audience—and he lets himself let go, lets himself watch and enjoy as Joker loses himself completely.

It’s only when Hisashi starts making louder grunts and says, “Fuck, fuck, I’m gonna come—” that Joker comes back to himself again.

His eyes regain a little focus as he looks down at the man he’s fucking, and in his breathy little ingenue voice he whispers, “Oh, oh, Hisashi-san, yes, come inside me, please,” and he looks dreamy and eager to please as he clenches hard around Hisashi and drives into him with more determined force than ever.

It doesn’t take long after that before Hisashi is clamping his eyes shut and letting out a long, deep moan—

And it isn’t a second after that before Joker reaches down, grabs his dagger from his jacket, and turns the shadow’s pleasured shout into one of agony as he slits its throat.

It transforms into a monstrous shadow form right under Joker, and Goro watches in horror as the shadow’s cock stays deep inside him but grows enormous and grotesque and surely very, very painful—but Joker keeps riding it, keeps it so deeply at his mercy that it only takes a few flicks of his dagger before he sends it exploding into black ooze.

Joker licks off the ooze on his lips with a groan, one that Goro only just manages to keep from echoing.

He has to touch himself, _now._ He takes a quick moment to catalogue his situation—the defeated monster is now rematerializing as a shadow and Joker has started in on his Phantom Thief spiel about changing his heart, somehow managing his usual commandeering grace even while he’s still pulling his pants back on. He’ll probably take the stairs on the opposite side of the platform from Goro to get out of here, so Goro should be safe crouching behind this pillar as he waits for Joker to leave.

His capacity for rational thought reaches its limit. Satisfied that he’ll be undetected, Goro starts palming himself over his costume in earnest as he lets his mind return to what he just saw. The look of absolute bliss on Joker’s face as he rode the monstrous shadow through its death throes, Joker’s tongue licking its ooze off his face, Joker’s flushed cheeks, Joker’s beautifully hard and neglected cock, fuck, he’s so close to coming, Joker’s arched back, Joker, _Joker_ —

Suddenly there’s a knife at his throat.

Goro freezes.

A low, husky voice whispers in his ear, “Enjoy the show, _Akechi_?”

Goro’s pulse races in his ears. It’s the only sound breaking the complete and utter silence, the terrified, heavy thumping of his heart. He feels that beat strongly in his jugular, each pulse jumping against the cool edge of Joker’s blade. His heart races, but Goro himself is completely and utterly still.

“Oh?” Joker says softly. His voice and the breath hitting Goro’s ear send terrified chills up his spine. “You looked like you were having fun. No need to stop on my account.”

When Goro remains frozen, wide-eyed and unable to form words, Goro can practically _hear_ Joker smirk before he flips Goro so that his back is against the pillar he’s been standing behind and so that Joker is leaning into him, seemingly towering over him. His dagger is still at Goro’s throat, with just the barest hint of pressure on his skin—but it’s enough to keep him still.

After a few seconds of Joker simply staring into his eyes, Goro realizes that his fear is purely instinctual, an automatic response to having a knife at his throat. When he really thinks about it, there’s no way that Joker would truly hurt him.

That doesn’t stop his heart from racing as Joker presses his body against Goro’s. The long, smooth planes of his legs and torso are all pressed right up against Goro now as Joker leans his entire body weight onto him, seemingly not minding the way the studded belts on Goro’s legs and arms press back. 

Scratch that—the way Joker leans further into him at those points, the fucker probably _likes_ it.

Somehow, that ridiculous thought is the one that lets Goro get his breath back under control. It’s a reminder: Joker is the one here who was caught, literally, with his pants down, doing something he definitely shouldn’t that his little team would absolutely not approve of. _Goro’s_ the one who tracked him down like prey.

So why does it feel so much like it’s the other way around?

_Get yourself together._

“I would say it seemed like your guest enjoyed the show too, but, well,” Goro finally says. He strokes a finger along Joker’s cheek, dragging it through the black ooze that’s still there in patches. “Seems like you cut the show short right at its climax.”

Joker just chuckles at that. He pulls the knife away from Goro’s throat and starts dragging it instead in lazy patterns along Goro’s collarbones and neck and chest. There’s no skin exposed and he doesn’t cut through Goro’s costume—but all the same it feels like a hot brand searing into his skin where the very tip of the knife is touching him. It’s a slightly ticklish, slightly terrifying sensation, and Goro’s not sure what it means that his body simultaneously wants to crawl away and wants to lean in for more.

He might have been enjoying himself before, he might have forgotten about how terrible the last few days have been, just for a little bit, but he remembers everything with crystal clarity now—because Joker has him right where he wants him, to use him and discard him just like he did that shadow. Goro has to get out of this. Goro has to figure out what Joker knows and how he knew he was there, and then _get out of there._

“Has it been fun watching me?” Joker asks casually, like they’re sitting at Leblanc talking over a game of chess and not like he’s hovering over Goro with a knife. “I’ve been desperately curious if you’ve enjoyed yourself, Akechi.”

“I—” Goro stutters. Joker’s found him here—no doubt about that—but there’s no reason Joker would know that Goro didn’t just happen upon him to see something very surprising and scandalous. “I assure you that what I’ve seen tonight was quite a surprise—”

“Oh, cut the bullshit,” Joker says, but his words are hardly sharp—there’s a fond smile behind them, like he finds Goro’s lie charming. “You haven’t been nearly as good at hiding as you think you are. Not tonight, and not any of the other nights, either.”

Goro can’t help the way his mouth goes slightly agape. _Any of the other nights…._ Shit.

Joker pauses, putting a gloved finger to his lips. Goro’s a little transfixed by the sight of the blood-red gloved finger against Joker’s bitten red, bloody lips. “Or maybe you are,” Joker muses, “and I’ve just gotten especially good at finding you.”

Goro feels frozen—he notices his mouth is slightly agape before he can shut it, feels that his cheeks must be blazing before he can calm himself down.

Joker hardly gives him a moment to recover—if anything, it seems like he’s really having fun now, the way he’s smiling as he watches Goro squirm like a cat playing with a toy. “Hm, tell me, which one was your favorite? Did you have fun watching me at the club? How about in the station square? Oh, and we can’t forget the time you snuck into Leblanc to watch me.”

Goro tries to use Joker’s distraction in his little monologue to push him up off of himself and get free, but for all that Joker’s lazily dragging his knife in patternless swirls, he reacts instantaneously to Goro’s movement, shifting his weight immediately to counter hiss attempt to escape. The knife is back at his throat in an instant, only this time, it _does_ cut into Goro’s throat—just a little, just enough to make him gasp at the pinprick of pain as a drop of blood slides down his neck.

“Well, Akechi?” His grin is predatory now, too many teeth and too much fire in his eyes now that he’s confirmed that Goro is well and truly stuck. “You get off on being a little voyeur? That’s the classy way to put it, isn’t it? _Voyeur?_ Others might be a little less generous and call you a spy.”

In one smooth motion, Joker pulls off Goro’s mask, throwing it aside. He presses the flat side of his knife to Goro’s cheek and caresses it almost tenderly as he whispers, “I, for one, would just call you a sweet little _slut,_ following me just so you can touch yourself.”

His words light Goro up with a fire of embarrassment, of indignation, and of burning, undeniable arousal. Joker must feel it too, with how Goro’s cock pulses at the word. “I don’t _touch myself,_ ” he seethes, because he doesn’t—usually doesn’t. Only since he’s started watching Akira, only since Akira became the sole focus of his pursuits.

Joker looks genuinely amused. “I’m not sure what else I’d call what you were doing, as pathetic as it was to watch you palm yourself through your striped pyjamas there.”

Goro makes the crucial mistake of breaking eye contact to try to gather his thoughts, and Joker pounces on that, lights up in realization. “Oh, or is it that you don’t _mean_ to touch yourself? What is it you tell yourself, Akechi? That you’re the stoic detective, watching because it’s his job, someone who’s above it all?” He brushes his other hand in a nearly-accidental, teasing stroke down the front of Goro’s suit, and Goro can’t help but hiss in pleasurable agony.

“Fine,” Goro seethes once he’s can catch his breath. “You caught me, how fucking clever of you. What now, are you going to tell the other Thieves about this, as if they didn’t hate me enough already? You have some sort of punishment in mind, _leader_? What the fuck do you want?”

He’s nearly shaking by the end, shouting and hoarse, feeling like a cornered animal running purely on survival instinct. So it’s only in the silence that follows, as he’s catching his breath and trying to figure out how exactly Joker plans to humiliate him, that he realizes that Joker is...blushing, just ever so slightly. His eyes are shining.

_What?_

“Actually,” Joker finally says, “perhaps you should be the one to punish me.”

_What._

“What,” Goro hisses, narrowing his eyes at Joker.

“After all, you’re the only one who knows about what I’ve gotten up to,” Joker says, back to tracing Goro’s chest with his knife—only now he’s not looking at it, now he’s far less careful, now it’s cutting tiny slices into Goro’s bodysuit and scratching the top layer of his skin, and it _stings._ But Goro refuses to flinch or to break away from Joker’s gleaming, wild stare. “I tell Mona I’m working late at the bar. Or sometimes I say I’m hanging out late with you—though I guess that one’s been more true than not these last few nights, hm? Futaba sometimes tracks me, but she only sees where I go. How would she ever guess the filthy things I’m doing once I get there?”

Joker’s restless knife hand finally stills. The blade is pressed nearly to Goro’s heart, but it’s not pushing, not pressing—it’s entreating, almost. “The others think I’m being their perfect leader, at home studying or training or working to pay for equipment. Whatever their leader needs to do, they let me handle it, no questions asked.”

He’s leaned in inches from Goro’s face now, and Goro is still pinned against a wall, still hemmed in by Joker and his knife, but suddenly it all feels so different from the way it did just moments ago—now it feels like he’s begging Goro for something, staring into him with an unhinged ferocity and begging for something.

“But you know. You know where I’ve been, you know that I’ve been...a bit of a _whore_ , hm?” He’s practically whispering, now, words brushing over And I think that deserves some punishment, don’t you?”

He’s fishing for a yes, right?

Goro has no fucking idea what’s going on.

This whole encounter has been strange, and Goro blames his horniness and then his surprise at being caught for his not having noticed it before—but it’s been strange. Joker doesn’t talk this much, not even as Joker. He doesn’t say things that sound like they came right out of a shitty porno, all batted eyelashes and pouts and “I’m a bad boy who needs punishment.”

Then again, two months ago he wouldn’t have said Joker was the type to have a different hookup every night. Maybe he knows less about Joker than he thought.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter. He’s seen Joker go around and wear a different mask with each person he fucks, becoming a wildly different person. So it only makes sense that Joker would come into this encounter with a specific idea of how it should go and who he’s going to be.

But what role is that? Who does he want Goro to be here?

No—that’s not what he should be trying to figure out. He doesn’t need to know what role Joker wants him to play; he shouldn’t want to play at all.

“I don’t understand what you’re looking to get out of this, Kurusu. Why did you pick me to fulfill your little punishment fantasy?”

“Why did I…” In the time it took for Goro to work through what was happening enough to coherently protest, Joker’s manic grin had slipped ever so slightly. “You—you heard me, Akechi. At Leblanc. When I didn’t even know you were there, I—”

“Yes, yes, heat of the moment, calling my name, understood,” Goro says quickly, trying to keep himself from bursting into flames from his sudden blush. Best not to dwell on that memory right now, for a whole host of reasons. “So what? It doesn’t matter.”

This is ridiculous. He shouldn’t be asking questions here—of course Joker will say he mattered, he’s always mattered, that Goro’s not just one of dozens of people he’s jerked off to and fantasized about who he now wants to add to his little collection of conquests.

“It doesn’t matter,” Goro seethes before Joker can say anything. “So, no. I don’t want to _punish_ you, Joker. I don’t want to _touch_ you.”

And for a just a moment, the person in front of him isn’t Joker anymore—there’s no bravado, no certainty, just a face that’s blank and unreadable and lost.

Only for a moment, though. Then the mask is back on in a flash.

“Fine,” Joker says. “You don’t want to touch me. I can work with that.”

And suddenly Joker’s lips are on Goro’s. They’re hot and slightly tacky, still, from the shadow’s ooze, but they’re all the more delicious for that. His tongue swipes along Goro’s bottom lip sensually, only for his teeth to then dig in right where his tongue just was, and it’s all so much, so fast, and so _good_ that Goro can’t help the moan that escapes him.

Joker seems to like hearing that from him, and he uses Goro’s groan as an opportunity to slide his tongue into his mouth. Goro’s suddenly having trouble remembering why he’s supposed to be indignant, what he’s supposed to be resisting, why he just said he doesn’t want to touch him, because he’s certainly enjoying the way Joker’s starting to touch _him._ The hands that were holding his shoulders to steady him for the sudden kiss are now moving, one splayed across his chest and one stroking his arm, and Goro reaches out to pull Joker closer to him, too.

Just as Goro’s clawed hand touches Joker’s shoulder, Joker _pushes_ himself away suddenly, and with it, pulls something off of Goro’s arm, too.

One of the belts from around Goro’s arm is now in Joker’s hand, and he whips it through the air to let out a huge _crack._

“That’s not what we decided, Akechi,” Joker says softly, his eyes blazing.

He holds the belt in his hand like a whip, and stares at Goro. “You’re too good for me. You don’t want to have to touch me. But you’ll watch me, isn’t that right?” And he stares, and stares, and _waits_.

Goro could run, could fight, could shove Joker back even further. He could get enough space between them so that Joker wouldn’t be able to touch him, and more than that, Joker would let him. That’s clear from his eyes, from the way he’s standing like he’s ready to pounce but still waiting for Goro to tell him he wants this.

And Goro does. He wants this _badly._

 _“That’s not what we decided,”_ Joker had said. Joker made it perfectly clear earlier—there were roles that he wanted them to play, there were rules to this whole encounter, and Goro might not have known what role he was supposed to be playing before, might have almost broken one of the rules just then—but he thinks he understands now.

Joker wants someone cold, someone haughty and above it all. Joker wants the Detective Prince, maybe, just a little icier and a little more of an asshole.

Joker wants someone who won’t want him back, someone who comes without any attachment. And that’s perfect, really. If that’s the role Joker sees him in, then it’ll make it all the easier for Joker to throw him away at the end of the month. He wants someone who never really wanted him, someone who he never really wanted in return.

He can play this role, and play it well, even if it’s the last thing he wants to do. He’s a natural, after all.

Goro lowers his head at Joker ever so slightly, and Joker attacks.

He pushes Goro up against the pole and uses Goro’s belts to tie his entire torso to it, arms lashed tightly at his sides. Goro stands perfectly still and holds his breath until Joker has him tied tightly; when he pulls against the belts they’re far more secure than Goro ever thought the decorative belts would be. Cognition, maybe? Actually, they’re tied even a little too tightly, from the way his hands are starting to tingle, but he’s not going to say anything about it— 

Certainly not now, when Joker is looking up and down Goro’s body, hungrily and shamelessly.

“So you don’t want to touch me,” Joker says, that manic smile back on his face. “But I know you love to watch, Goro. And I can put on an excellent show.”

Joker brushes a red-gloved finger against Goro’s bottom lip, right where it’s still tender from the bite, and the teasing touch makes him shiver. That just makes Joker smirk even more as he drags that feather-light touch down Goro’s neck and across his collarbone; his expression is focused, like he’s memorizing every shiver and jolt and soft whimper that his touch somehow pulls out of Goro. It’s such a _light_ touch, and yet it’s burning, somehow both too much sensation and not nearly enough, he needs _more—_

Joker laughs, and Goro realizes that he’s been writhing against his restraint, trying to pull Joker closer to him and lean into his touch.

“Don’t get impatient,” Joker says fondly. He smiles down at Goro as his finger circles one of his nipples lightly, then the other, and then follows a diagonal stripe across Goro’s torso to his stomach. It’s ticklish in the worst way, and when Joker idly slides his fingers across those little cuts and scratches he left earlier, Goro hisses slightly in protest again. Joker isn’t even listening anymore. He seems far too captivated by the very prominent erection that Goro’s tight bodysuit does absolutely nothing to hide—no, if anything, his damn Metaverse outift makes it worse, because the stripes accentuate each movement every time his cock twitches as Joker’s finger draws closer, closer, closer to it.

His touch is wandering so close, now—onto his hip, down the crease of his pelvis, up his inner thigh, and Goro squeezes his eyes shut in anticipation of the agony that will be that finger reaching its destination—

Only for him to suddenly feel no touch there at all.

Goro’s eyes shoot open to figure out why the fuck Joker is stopping. Then he sees that Joker’s no longer looming over him to touch him—he’s on his knees.

Joker looks up at Goro, his face slightly red and his eyes gleaming behind his dark, gorgeous eyelashes. He smirks slightly—and then Goro nearly combusts, because there’s a wet heat mouthing at the shape of his cock through the fabric of his costume. Joker’s mouth moves roughly up the length, getting the shape and feel and even the heat of it but not tasting it, not _taking_ it, and Goro’s not sure how much longer he can take it if Joker doesn’t get Goro’s clothes off of him right now.

As if he’s read his mind, Joker grabs his dagger and then hastily, greedily, cuts a line down the front of Goro’s bodysuit, then pulls the two sides of it apart. A huge Cheshire grin grows on his face as he does.

“So,” Joker says, utterly delighted, “you wear nothing underneath this costume, hm, Goro?”

Goro refuses to look at Joker, trying and failing once more to hide a deep flush. He has, in fact, thought about this very issue—largely in the context of other times he’s gotten boners in the Metaverse. His suit is extremely skintight, and although cognitive-whatever makes it so that the lack of underwear doesn’t leave him jostling around or chafed or particularly exposed, it does make it extremely difficult to hide an erection. Which was never a problem, because he was never around anyone who mattered when he wore this suit, but now…

Now, he’s spent the last few weeks fighting right at Joker’s side in this costume, and he’s been doing a lot of hiding behind creative sword placement.

Here, he’s fully on display for Joker, and Joker is studying him from where he kneels in front of him, his gaze moving slowly from the bead of precome at the tip of his cock to his bound torso and twitching hands, to his bruised lips, and back down—just watching.

“Could you perhaps get a fucking move on, or are you just going to _look at me_ all night?” Goro says, seething.

Joker chuckles darkly. “Sorry, I forgot you’re the one who watches shamelessly. It’s my job to give you something to watch, isn’t it?”

With that, Joker strides away, just out of range for Goro to be able to kick.

Which is good for him, because Goro finds himself kicking out anyway, trying to reach out to Joker to bring him the fuck back.

“Did you forget that you were in the middle of something?” Goro asks, his voice just a touch more breathless than the anger he’s trying to go for.

“No,” he says simply, before turning around, looking at Goro with bedroom eyes and slowly running his hands down his torso. He lets out a small moan as his gloved hands run over his chest and stomach, and grabs his own ass to squeeze firmly. He gives Goro a slow, demure blink, before his beautiful fingers come up to his vest and start opening the buttons, one by one.

Goro swallows. _Don’t get distracted._ “Then could I _ever so politely_ ask—”

“You’re really noisy, you know,” Joker says conversationally, turning his back to Goro. His vest is fully unbuttoned now, and he gives a slow, over-exaggerated roll of his back to let it slip off his shoulders. He lets his shirt fall down his arms slowly, the rolling curves of his biceps catching the gray fabric as it slides down his skin and shows inch after torturous inch of his chiseled back, before it comes to linger around his wrists like manacles and finally falls off completely.

Holding his shirt just by the tips of his gloved fingers, Joker turns back around and takes slow steps towards Goro. The way his hips move can’t be an accident. It’s only accentuated by the fact that he’s no longer wearing a shirt, the smooth expanses of skin utterly mesmerizing to Goro.

“I think you ought to shut up and enjoy the show,” Joker says with a sweet smile, and then he stuffs his shirt in Goro’s mouth, tying the tails around the back of his head so that Goro can’t just spit it out.

The shirt is a little damp and sweaty and smells so strongly of pure _Joker_ , more Joker than Goro’s ever had at once, and it’s filling his whole mouth, overwhelming all his senses, far too much—

Joker just huffs a laugh as Goro squirms, wide-eyed, and lets out a growl that’s nearly completely muffled. “That’s better,” he says.

He slinks over to the subway bench, still directly in Goro’s line of sight but entirely out of reach, and then lowers himself down like a goddamn stripper, ass thrust out as he takes a seat and crosses his legs dramatically. He starts by just just running his hands over his whole body. Each new place his hands wander to—caressing his neck as he throws his head back, the softness of his stomach, the ridges of each rib—is a new place that Goro is suddenly desperate to touch himself just to see what it feels like. Watching the red of Joker’s quick gloved fingers slide against the creamy white of his skin draws attention to stretch after stretch of delicious skin that he can’t touch.

Then he uncrosses his legs and spreads them wide as one hand makes its way to his waistband.

“That night you spied on me at Leblanc?” Joker says, biting his lip as he stares straight into Goro’s eyes. His fingers are nimbly unbuttoning his pants, while the other hand has started softly rubbing at his chest, and Goro tries to hold Joker’s gaze but can’t help breaking it to look at the fingers working his stiffening nipple, down to the hand lingering at the opening of his waistband, then back up to those sultry bedroom eyes.

“God, I was so horny,” Joker says, finally closing his eyes like he’s lost in a delicious memory. All the better—Goro can keep his eyes on Joker’s delicate fingers. “You’d kept me out with you _all day_ , with breakfast and chess, then sitting not quite close enough on the couch while we watched that movie. Then oh, god—” he punctuates the thought with a tweak of his nipple and a moan— “You kept bending over the goddamn billiards table right in front of me, showing off your ass like a little tease. By the time we got to the jazz club I was certain you were fucking with me, the way your mouth was moving on your straw.”

Goro remembers precisely none of this. He remembers a perfectly normal distance while watching the movie and a completely unremarkable game of billiards, and he does remember waiting to see if Joker would give up on his boring, sexless company and go off on one of his trysts. Apparently, Joker was horny enough to read sex into it anyway.

Not that Goro can say any of this, with the gag in his mouth—and with his eyes closed, Joker can’t read the look of disdain that Goro tries to give him.

“As soon as I got home, I just—I couldn’t help myself,” Joker says, and he’s finally pulling his pants off, one long, lean leg at a time.

Earlier when Joker was taking his pants off to fuck Hisashi, it was all so quick, both pants and underwear off in a flash. Now, though, Goro takes in what he couldn’t see before: the pair of tight, lacy briefs, bright red, finally answering the question Goro has had for longer than he’d admit about whether Joker’s spirit of rebellion included underwear like his apparently didn’t.

It’s a gorgeous garment, lace edges clinging to Joker’s sharp hip bones and cutting off just under the curve of his ass.

Goro’s really not going to need jackoff material for the rest of his pathetically short life, is he.

Joker walks back over, letting Goro take him in: naked except for two red gloves and the red underwear covering what is most definitely an erection.

 _Getting off just on being watched,_ Goro thinks, and if the thought comes to him a little fondly, no one will ever know.

Except Joker seems to know, or at least to be able to read _something_ in Goro’s gaze, because when he gets close enough he strokes Goro’s cheek, the burning warmth something Goro can’t help but lean into.

“And here you are again, just like then. Watching me, but not touching. Frozen just like prey when you realize you might be caught.”

Joker laughs, low and quiet. “You thought you got away with it, didn’t you, Goro? And it’s true, I didn’t realize you were there until right as I came, right when I saw you standing in the shadows, all wide-eyed and panicked.” Joker licks his lips, smiling. “You really thought you got away with it.”

He gives one long, slow grind against the whole length of Goro’s body, and if his mouth wasn’t full of Joker’s shirt, he’s certain that he’d have been ashamed of the moan he lets out. He can’t help it—he’s still wearing far too much of his costume as Joker presses his nearly naked body against Goro’s. But as it is, his voice is muffled into nothingness, and as he pushes his hips up to meet Joker he realizes that he’s writhing against nothingness now, too, because Joker pulls away as soon as Goro moves.

“No cheating, Goro. I can touch you, but you can only watch. That’s how you want it, isn’t it?”

Goro’s still catching his breath from the intense feeling of Joker’s body pressed against his, but finally, he meets Joker’s eyes.

As soon as Joker holds his gaze once again, Joker slowly raises one hand to his mouth. He presses his lips to his own delicate wrist, to the soft skin always hidden by the cuff of the glove. Then, without breaking eye contact, he bites into the cuff of the glove and throws his head back to _rip_ it off of his hand.

Goro almost comes right then.

Joker must notice, because he just laughs, tossing his head once more to send the glove flying to the side.

He presses two now-bare fingers to his lips, as if covering his laugh demurely. But there’s nothing innocent about the way his tongue then darts out around those fingers, flicking over the tips before wrapping around each finger to leave them wet and shiny in its wake.

 _He’s not going for subtlety at all,_ Goro thinks. The oldest and most obnoxious trick in the book—show how you can use your tongue, practically putting up a neon sign saying _this could be you._ Desperate. Obnoxious.

It does disastrous things to Goro’s dick anyway. His traitorous dick, which knows nothing of subtlety; it sees the sweet pink of Joker’s tongue and the way the corners of his mouth twitch up into a smirk and it can suddenly think of nothing it needs more than having that mouth around him, right now.

Between the generous twitch of his cock and the whimper he lets out around the gag, Joker must notice the effect his little show has on Goro—he looks incredibly pleased with himself. Goro takes him in from head to toe: his hair is wildly mussed from the way he’s been running his fingers through it, his mask is still on over his flushed, red cheeks, and he has just his left glove on now, the only other garment on him his tight, lacy underwear.

When Joker notices where Goro’s gaze has gone, he smirks, sliding one of the red-covered fingers of his left hand into the waistband of those underwear and pulling it away from his skin just slightly, showing the tantalizing skin underneath.

“Want these to come off?” he asks, before he lets go of the waistband and lets it _snap_ back onto his hip. Goro whimpers.

“Pervert,” Joker says with a smile, before putting his hands at the bottom edges of the underwear and pulling slowly, slowly, slowly down and dragging his hard cock with the pull of the silk—until his cock finally breaks free and snaps back up, finally liberated. It’s nothing Goro hasn’t seen before, but having it revealed like this, like an unwrapped gift from red shimmering lace, makes it suddenly one of the most precious things he’s seen. His mouth waters a little, though that might be the gag in his mouth doing that.

Joker shimmies to let the underwear fall down his long legs, then bends down to pick them up, curving his ass up to present it for Goro’s inspection. He tosses the garment towards Goro where it falls daintily at his feet, and then he slowly pulls himself back up, taking his time to rub his hands up his calves and thighs and hipbones and chest as he goes.

He steps up close to Goro. When their noses are just a few inches from touching, he gently takes off his mask, letting it fall to the ground. Goro doesn’t let go of his gaze, transfixed by the high splashes of color on his cheeks and the way his dark eyelashes rise and fall so prettily.

“Tell me what you think, Goro,” Joker says, leaning over to whisper directly into Goro’s ear. The hot breath against his ear makes him shiver, but not as much as he shudders when Joker then takes his earlobe between his teeth, nibbling ever so gently.

But then he’s facing Goro, fingers gently untying the shirt from behind his head and then slowly prying it out of Goro’s mouth. His eyes are wide and so, so earnest as he says, “Tell me.”

It’s only the stiffness from the gag as he opens his mouth that stops him from vocalizing his first thought, which is, _You’re beautiful._

The shot of pain in his jaw as he tries to open his mouth is like a reprimand, shocking him back to reality.

 _Fuck._ He let himself get far too into this, he—he’s panicking a little now, silently, as Joker stares on at him with big honest eyes, because the moment Joker drew him in with his show his mind went blank.

He’d forgotten to keep his mask on. He’s failed at being who Joker wants him to be, and he’s failed at being the person he _needs_ to be if this is going to work.

He exaggeratedly moves his jaw up and down to massage out the soreness and to get time to compose himself.

 _Don’t fuck up again,_ he thinks.

He clears his throat. “What is it you want, Joker, a standing ovation?” It comes out not nearly as steady as he wants it to, but its dryness is undebatable.

“Still trying to pretend you’re fine, hm?” Joker says. He’s smiling a little, rolling his eyes like this is some funny joke between them. He leans back into Goro’s space and dances his fingers down Goro’s front to lightly brush over his erection. “This says otherwise,” he teases.

“I’m not trying to _pretend_ anything,” Goro says, kicking his leg out to try to push Joker’s hand away. Joker just bites into the side of his neck, where Goro’s least able to resist, and his body betrays his facade of disinterest by gasping and shuddering at the feeling of Joker’s teeth against his skin.

He’ll just have to try harder to overcome his body’s weaknesses.

He yanks his neck away from Joker as best he can around his restraints and growls, shaking his head until Joker finally pulls back. Once Goro’s finally free from his touch, he rolls his eyes at Joker, “Of course I’ll have a physical reaction if you touch me like this. If you put on a little show like that I’ll respond as well, but it’s no different from if I was watching porn or, for that matter, from watching any of the other dozen people I’ve spied on in this city. It has nothing to do with you.”

Okay, maybe that came out a bit more defensive-lecture and less hard-to-get than he might have hoped, but the fact that Joker has stopped touching him and is looking up with huge, questioning eyes is good enough.

“The….other people?”

When Goro sees the slight betrayal flash across Joker’s face, Goro makes a sudden realization. He’s felt like he’s drowning up until this moment, like he overplayed his hand and let Joker get the better of him. Joker, who doesn’t care about him. Joker, who thinks nothing of him. Now, he sees confusion and hurt cross Joker’s face, and he grasps at the possibility to get the upper hand.

“What,” he says with a sneering, dismissive smile. “You thought you were special? You didn’t mind my being a sick, voyeuristic freak, but only for you—only if I was _specifically_ looking for you? You thought you were the only one?”

When Joker just gapes slowly with those big eyes, Goro keeps going. “I’ve watched so many people across this city, Joker. I was never looking for _you._ I came across you, and kept coming across you, because you’re a little _whore_ letting yourself be used by everyone in the city. It’s not my fault I found you.”

Something flashes across Joker’s face at the word _whore,_ something that he can’t tamp down quite as easily. Somehow it’s different, and Goro knows it is, from when Joker called himself a bit of a whore—he’d flushed pleasantly then, an excited little smile on his face, but now he winces, eyes darting away from Goro’s face.

“But…” Joker tries, “You—you kept following me. You didn’t just _find_ me, you _followed_ me, just me, and why would you do that if—”

“Leverage, of course,” Goro says simply. “I think sharing your nighttime exploits with your innocent friends is fairly good blackmail, don’t you? And I never make a deal with someone without gaining adequate leverage to hold over them.”

It’s false, of course—Goro’s made so many ill-planned deals in his life, God knows he didn’t have nearly as much leverage against Shido as he thought he did at fifteen—but it sounds sharp and smart, and most important, it leaves Joker looking defeated.

At least, just for a moment. Then his mask returns—but this time, it’s not the showman Joker, ever hungry for the spotlight, demanding all eyes on him with a smirk.

No—the mask he’s wearing now is the Joker who puts an end to things. He’s the Joker who stares down a shadow and decides whether to take its life or shake it down for money or take it into his soul. Not even the Joker who does those things for fun sometimes, or to show off. This is the Joker who appears at the end of one of the team’s forays into a palace, when everyone on the team is tired. Tiredness means mistakes, so Joker drops his cockiness. His friends’ safety will always come first, so he doesn’t take unnecessary risks.

That’s what this is—Joker is staring down Goro like he might be nothing more than an unnecessary risk.

“You’re right,” he finally says. “This doesn’t mean anything to either of us. I don’t mean anything. You’re not mine, and I’m not yours. This can just be...letting off steam. Just sex. Okay?”

A recommitment to the rules. A reinstatement of the roles, all nonverbal, conveyed just through the a shift in the air and a change in the mood. Goro’s his rival; he has to keep up with these things, even if it hurts.

 _Just sex. As if it ever meant anything more to you,_ Goro thinks bitterly, but he nods. That’s what this should be, that’s what this _has been_ , and nothing else—and if he’d thought otherwise, if either of them had thought otherwise, then they were fools.

At Goro’s nod Joker carefully fits the gag back into Goro’s mouth, and Goro opens up for it, mostly because he has no idea where this is going but Joker seems to. Then he tears a long piece of fabric from where he’d cut open Goro’s costume ages ago, exposing more of Goro’s chest and stomach in the process.

He takes that strip of blue and black striped fabric and carefully ties it around Goro’s eyes in a makeshift blindfold, working in slow, methodical silence.

As he finishes tying it, Goro comes to the sudden realization about just how helpless he is—his torso and hands are completely bound, and now he’s lost his sight and voice, too.

He doesn’t mind nearly as much as he thinks he should; some part of him trusts Joker with his life, even now.

But Joker seems to have the same realization about Goro’s helplessness, because Goro hears him pick his dagger off the floor. Then he feels it placed in his own hand.

Which is very strange—Goro can hardly move his wrists enough to move the dagger up and down with the way he’s bound, much less be able to use it defensively.

Goro jolts in surprise to suddenly feel hot breath against his ear once again; Joker has moved up next to him so silently that he didn’t notice. “If you want me to stop whenever, just drop that and I’ll stop. I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do. But…”

Goro hears Joker take a deep breath. “But otherwise it’s just sex. I’m not me, and you’re not you. Let’s just...have this.” 

The mood has come down considerably by now, as has Goro’s boner, but the rush of heat against his earlobe definitely stirs his interest again. And when Joker takes his earlobe between his teeth and bites it gently, his dick commends the effort with a little more stirring as well.

“That’s it, Detective,” Joker says, the purr back in his voice. He mouths down the column of Goro’s neck, open-mouthed and hot as his tongue presses into the skin. Somehow, not being able to _see_ the cocky smirk that he knows is on Joker’s face makes him _feel_ it so strongly, feel that slight upturn of Joker’s lips as he presses them into Goro’s collarbone and sucks.

“Stop thinking,” Joker says a little sharply. “Forget who I am. Forget it’s me.”

That would be easier, Goro thinks, if Joker would _stop talking._ If Joker has chosen these roles for them and wants Goro to treat him like he’s just some anonymous, faceless fuck, then god, step one would be to _shut his fucking mouth._

Because as it is, Joker is muttering a stream of dirty nothings against Goro’s collarbone while his hands work their way down to pull off what’s left of Goro’s costume, and Goro can’t pretend that voice is anyone’s but Akira’s. Not when he’s heard it in so many contexts, playing so many parts—the voice of a leader one moment, of a friend the next; a sharp, commanding dominatrix with one night and a breathless, gasping virgin with the next.

“Good boy,” Akira says in Joker’s low, commanding tone, the words going straight to Goro’s dick.

No—whatever role Akira is playing, Goro would know his voice anywhere.

And not just his voice. Even if Akira _did_ stop talking, it wouldn’t be enough to turn him into some anonymous hookup. He’d still feel gloved fingers rubbing at his nipple until he’s whimpering at the touch, and know that it’s _Akira’s_ glove; he’d still moan under the searing tongue licking its way down Goro’s stomach and know that it’s _Akira’s_ tongue, Akira’s mouth, Akira’s lips curling up into what Goro can see without seeing is _Akira’s_ smirk as they settle right at his hip.

He couldn’t forget who’s doing this if he tried. And even if he could, he’s not sure he’d want to.

“Relax,” Akira says, nibbling at Goro’s hip and then the soft divot between his hip and pelvis. “I can hear you thinking, and that means I’m not doing my job right. I want to make you feel good, Detective.”

 _Detective_. He has a role to play, he’s not doing this right, not being who Akira wants him to be, but—Akira’s bound and gagged and blindfolded him, has made it so he can’t possibly fuck up this role, and maybe that’s the only way Akira can stand him at all—

All thought stops immediately when he feels Akira’s tongue swipe at the head of his cock to lick off the precum beaded there. Goro is suddenly utterly incapable of thinking of anything else but the way that tongue is making small, teasing circles at his tip, sending minor explosions of feeling through his entire body.

“That’s it,” Akira says quietly as he presses kisses up and down Goro’s length. He stills for just a moment and pinches Goro’s thigh—not hard, just enough to draw him out of the mindless pleasure that Goro was lost in. “Don’t forget,” he says, “drop that if you want me to stop.”

Goro had honestly forgotten the dagger that Akira had placed in his hand earlier, but when he hears Akira’s words his grip goes instinctively tighter. _Anything but that._

Akira chuckles. “As you wish,” he says, before taking Goro into the impossible silky heat of his mouth, warm and hot and everywhere and _so much_ that Goro can’t help but shout and buck up his hips.

Akira chokes ever so slightly, and Goro is suddenly worried for both of them, but mostly himself, because he very nearly comes just at the feeling of Akira’s throat seizing up against him. 

Thankfully, he doesn’t, and Akira recovers quickly as well, easing Goro out of his throat just enough so that he can lave the head of his cock with his tongue. He gets into a rhythm, swirling his tongue around the ridge then giving the very tip a few kittenish licks before starting again. After only a few repetitions of that, Goro is squirming against his restraints as much as he can, but Akira is holding his thighs, keeping him down.

Finally, he gives Goro some relief from the buildup and moves his tongue down the shaft, taking Goro deeper into his mouth. With more of his cock now seated snugly in the soft tightness of Joker’s mouth—Goro’s pretty sure this is the best thing he’s ever felt.

He’s given blowjobs, of course. He knows the general idea and the tips you can look up, knows that what Joker’s doing is, while very good as blowjobs go, nothing totally out of the ordinary, either.

But god, being on the other side of the act is a different thing entirely.

He knows how crazy the guys he’s blown went for when he made eye contact while sucking them off, just another one of those advice-column tricks. But just the thought of Akira doing that right now is driving him crazy—and the worst part is that Goro can't see. He wonders what color his pretty bruised lips are, stretching tight around Goro’s cock as he meets Goro’s gaze. He wonders how blown his pupils are, wonders how his beautiful dark eyelashes would look as he blinks demurely—fuck, just the thought of what Akira must look like right now, how utterly obscene it must be, makes Goro groan deeply.

His groan must be loud enough for Akira to hear even around his gag, because he feels Akira smile at that, keeping up his steady rhythm as he gives a pleased little hum, and the vibrations send him dangerously close to the edge, and fuck, he needs, he _needs—_

He hits the dagger against the pillar he’s tied to, trying to get Akira’s attention before it’s too late. But Akira doesn’t seem to hear, keeps working Goro closer and closer, and fuck, he has to—

He drops the dagger.

Akira detaches himself immediately and stands up, catching his breath for just a second before hastily taking the gag out of Goro’s mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is so utterly fucking wrecked that Goro’s cock twitches again, desperate to get back into that abused throat.

“Take off the blindfold,” Goro says, his own voice hoarse from disuse and soreness, but he tries to convey his desperation as best he can.

Akira complies immediately, his eyes wide and worried, and when Goro finally blinks his eyes open, Akira is somehow even _more_ of a sight than he could have ever imagined—saliva at the corners of his mouth, lips the color of a fresh bruise, cheeks flushed and red. Goro groans at the sight of him, and says, “Now keep going, fuck.”

Akira furrows his brow, slowly shaking his head. “No, I—you dropped the—”

“Fuck, keep _fucking going._ Isn't this, didn't you say—” Goro's unable to help the desperate growl in his voice as he grasps desperately for the right words to push Akira back into motion. “You're here to fucking please me, right? What the fuck else are you good for, _whore?_ ”

Akira flinches. He stares at Goro uncomprehendingly.

But finally he nods and falls back to his knees, saying, “Of course,” throaty and soft and not quite meeting his eyes.

He shakes his head a bit, and looks back up at Goro, the smirk returned to his face. “Of course, Detective,” he says, gloved hand hastily stroking Goro back to full hardness. “What kind of performance would this be if I left you hanging just before the grand finale?”

Thankfully, Goro doesn’t have to think too hard about that, or about any of this, because Akira takes Goro back in his mouth and jumps straight into where they left off. His throat is already open and abused, molded just for him. Jumping straight from his cock exposed in the chilly air of Mementos to being seated in the depths of Akira’s throat makes his entire lower body feel like it’s been set on fire. It’s so much, so suddenly, that Goro can’t help but shout, _“Fuck,_ Akira!”

At his shout, Akira picks up the pace, and Goro throws his head back, eyes screwed shut and moaning Akira’s name with each small bob of his head.

He feels suddenly and with great certainty that he’s moments away from being shoved over the edge of his climax, and he whimpers, “Fuck, Akira, I’m gonna come.”

Only then does he remember why he’d dropped the dagger, why he’d had Akira stop in the first place—to look at him, to finally get to watch him on _his_ dick _—_ and he’s been too mindless and eyes-shut with pleasure to do even that. Glad he’s at least remembered before it’s all over, he looks down to take Akira in.

Akira’s staring up at him, just as erotically beautiful as Goro had imagined he would be—no, more so. When he feels Goro start to pulse with the warnings of his impending orgasm, Akira holding tight onto Goro’s thighs, one gloved and one bare hand clenched into his soft skin, brows furrowed in concentration.

It’s only as Goro finally, finally comes, releasing down Akira’s throat, that he sees that the eyelashes blinking up at him are wet, that Akira’s cheeks are damp with tears.

But then Goro’s screwing his eyes shut from overstimulation as Akira tears aftershocks of pleasure out of him, sucking him down and swallowing it all. By the time Goro can open his eyes again, Akira’s already put his Joker mask back on.

  


* * *

  


Goro can’t sleep for a long, long time that night.

He alternates between the following discrete states:

First: confused. He plays back everything Akira said that night in his mind, trying to piece together every cryptic word into some semblance of meaning. He doesn’t get very far with this— thinking back on things Akira said inevitably reminds him of the things that _happened_ between the things he said, and that catapults him directly into the second and third states.

Second: guilty. He feels horribly guilty when he remembers seeing Akira’s tears, which then sends him straight back to state one, confusion, because he has absolutely no idea what could have caused Akira to cry in that moment. He remembers the hurt that flashed across Akira’s face when Goro called him a _whore_ , and there’s confusion again, because wasn’t that what he wanted? The word had come out of his mouth so easily. He wonders idly if Shido ever said it just like he did, calling his mother a whore while she was on her knees for him.

Both of these states at some point or another inevitably lead to the third: horny. Horribly, guiltily horny. Because no matter how much he ruminates on the confusion or sinks into the guilt—no matter how much he tries to make those the predominant effects of the evening—he can’t forget what came next and before and in between: Joker’s hands on him, Joker’s hands on _himself_ , his teeth pulling off his own glove, his fingers gently tearing off Goro’s clothes, his mouth, his mouth, his _mouth…_

Goro jerks off so many times it hurts; it’s long since stopped being enjoyable by the third time. But he can’t help it; each time his thoughts progress through the cycle of confusion and guilt and inevitably land back on those images, those sensations, Goro is hard again. He keeps hoping that this orgasm will be the one to send him off into a mindless haze and finally let him sleep.

After number four, he wipes himself off and throws the tissue onto the floor to join the others, and he finally feels something like drowsiness pulling him under. He’s so ready to succumb to it—only for the ever-present Joker in his mind to say, “You’re not mine, I’m not yours,” and for Goro to hear his own voice whisper, “Whore.” His eyes snap awake again, and he groans.

After the fifth orgasm, when he’s coming dry and painfully with a choking cry, his body takes pity on him: he’s barely dropped the tissue over the edge of the bed when he shuts his eyes and feels himself drifting off.

Confusion, guilt, pleasure—they all coalesce into one hazy dream image in front of him. It’s his mother, just as she looks in the single picture Goro still has of her, eyes wide and hopeful and bangs freshly cut. She’s on her knees in front of him, looking up with tears glistening on her eyelashes and down her cheeks, just like Joker, and as she wraps her lips around his cock, his voice, or maybe Shido’s voice, or maybe they’ve been the same voice all along, whispers, _whore._

Goro jolts awake. He feels like he’s going to be sick, goes to the bathroom ready to throw up. His body doesn’t let him have even that relief.

He decides he’s had enough of trying to sleep for tonight.

When he looks out the window, the sky is just barely tinged with brightening wisps of light blue, welcoming the sun’s cold, wintry rise.

Goro opens the window in his bedroom, moves the screen, and steps out onto the fire escape. It’s unbearably cold. Goro sits down anyway, in his boxers and faded t-shirt, feels the freezing metal sear into the bare skin of his lower thigh, lets the cutting frost of the breeze cut against his cheeks.

He lets his feet dangle over the fire escape as he watches the sunrise, his hair blowing across his face. It might be the most beautiful sunrise he’s ever seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one has continued to be a challenge, but thank you for sticking with it regardless! a million more thanks to Goumaden for steam cleaning this after akira left cum stains all over the carpet.
> 
> the final chapter will eventually be posted, but it will take a while, because...i'm trying nanowrimo! i'll be working on a fic i've been thinking about for months now. it's exciting and terrifying, and i'll be holed up in a ditch for all of november, but i'll be back in december! at which point this will get its conclusion. (and maybe, maybe, maybe? a short one-shot sequel finale. _maybe._ ) see you all then!

**Author's Note:**

> i swear that this was supposed to be a oneshot i swear that this was supposed to be a oneshot i swear that this
> 
> thank you eternally to [Goumaden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goumaden/pseuds/Goumaden) for beta'ing and summarily executing a thousand unnecessary commas.
> 
> twitter: [@shantealeaves](https://twitter.com/shantealeaves)


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